he could obtain some literary work in the city. Such was Thoreau’s hope. For all concerned, this was an auspicious and welcome opportunity. Elizabeth Hoar sent him an inkstand as a token; Prudence Ward gave him a small microscope.
Emerson wrote his brother a brief caveat based on his own experiences. Thoreau “is a bold and a profound thinker,” he wrote, “though he may easily chance to pester you with some accidental crotchets and perhaps a village exaggeration of the value of facts.”149 Emerson had confessed as much to Hawthorne, who wrote in his journal around this time, “Mr. Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an inmate.”150 But Emerson concluded his warning with the promise that “if you should content each other,” Willie would soon come “to value him for his real power to serve and instruct him. I shall eagerly look, though not yet for some time, for tidings how you speed in this new relation.”151
Thoreau visited Hawthorne before leaving, going out on the river with him in the Musketaquid, the boat Thoreau had sold him in the fall. Hawthorne was glad on Thoreau’s account, as he is “physically out of health, and, morally and intellectually, seems not to have found exactly the guiding clue; and in all these respects, he may be benefitted by his removal.” It was on everyone’s mind but only Hawthorne expressed it on paper: “Also, it is one step towards a circumstantial position in the world.” But on his own account, the introverted and sometimes reclusive Hawthorne would have preferred that Thoreau stay, “he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree.”152
Elizabeth Hoar told Emerson that “I love Henry, but do not like him.”153 As he struggled with his own relationship with Henry, this may have seemed like a motto to their own friendship. “Young men, like Henry Thoreau, owe us a new world, and they have not acquitted the debt,” Emerson wrote in his journal. “For the most part, such die young, and so dodge the fulfilment.”154 Perhaps in New York Thoreau would not be able to dodge what Emerson thought he owed the world.
Emerson was confident about this new episode in his young friend’s life, writing to his brother, “And now goes our brave youth into the new house, the new connexion, the new City. I am sure no truer and no purer person lives in wide New York.”155 Henry was missed. Waldo wrote him, “You will not doubt that you are well remembered here, by young, older, and old people and your letter to your mother was borrowed and read with great interest, pending the arrival of direct accounts and of later experiences especially in the city.”156
Away from home Henry realized not just what he owed to Waldo, but also to Lidian. “I believe a good many conversations with you were left in an unfinished state, and now indeed I don’t know where to take them up,” he wrote her.
I think of you as some elder sister of mine, whom I could not have avoided,—a sort of lunar influence,—only of such age as the moon, whose time is measured by her light. You must know that you represent to me woman. . . . I thank you for your influence for two years. I was fortunate to be subjected to it, and am now to remember it. It is the noblest gift we can make; what signify all others that can be bestowed? You have helped to keep my life “on loft,” as Chaucer says of Griselda, and in a better sense. You always seemed to look down at me as from some elevation—some of your high humilities—and I was the better for having to look up. I felt taxed not to disappoint your expectation; for could there be any accident so sad as to be respected for something better than we are? It was a pleasure even to go away from you, as it is not to meet some, as it apprised me of my high relations; and such a departure is a sort of further introduction and meeting. Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.157
Thoreau reminded Lidian to not think
fate is so dark there, for even here I can see a faint reflected light over Concord. . . .
I have hardly begun to live on Staten Island yet; but, like the man who, when forbidden to tread on English ground, carried Scottish ground in his boots, I carry Concord ground in my boots and in my hat,—and am I not made of Concord dust? I cannot realize that it is the roar of the sea I hear now, and not the wind in Walden woods. I find more of Concord, after all, in the prospect of the sea, beyond Sandy Hook, than in the fields and woods.158
Sometimes his homesickness manifested itself physically. “I have been sick ever since I came here—rather unaccountably, what with a cold, bronchitis, acclimation etc.—still unaccountably.”159 He was disappointed in what little of New York he had seen so far. He tried to write something for The Dial but wasn’t sure he could “finish an account of a winter’s walk in Concord in the midst of a Staten Island summer.”160 When he did finish it, it was too late for immediate publication, but Emerson offered to hold on to it, for which Thoreau was grateful. “As for the ‘Winter’s Walk,’” Thoreau wrote, “I should be glad to have it printed in the D. if you think it good enough, and will criticise it—otherwise send it to me and I will dispose of it.”161 Emerson found the essay full of Thoreau’s “old fault of unlimited contradiction. . . . it makes me nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.”162 When the next issue of The Dial was being sent to the printer, Emerson wrote to Thoreau that he
had some hesitation about it, notwithstanding its faithful observation and its fine sketches of the pickerel-fisher and of the woodchopper, on account of mannerism, an old charge of mine,—as if, by attention, one could get the trick of the rhetoric; for example, to call a cold place sultry, a solitude public, a wilderness domestic (a favorite word), and in the woods to insult over cities, whilst the woods, again, are dignified by comparing them to cities, armies, etc. By pretty free omissions, however, I have removed my principal objections.163
When James Russell Lowell omitted one sentence from Thoreau’s essay “Chesuncook” in 1858, Thoreau was uncompromisingly vehement when he said that the “editor has, in this case, no more right to omit a sentiment than to insert one, or put words into my mouth.”164 In relation to “A Winter’s Walk” and Emerson’s edits, he was much more forgiving. Whether simply from this happening earlier in his writing career, or out of deference to his friend, he wrote Emerson, “I doubt if you have made more corrections in my manuscript than I should have done ere this, though they may be better; but I am glad you have taken any pains with it.”165
“I don’t like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” Thoreau wrote after months in New York. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. . . . The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.”166 One highlight, however, was the theologian Henry James, about whom Emerson had said “you must not fail to visit.”167 Thoreau found in James someone who
makes
