or stands still in his own place. I know of no one so patient and determined to have the good of you. It is almost friendship, such plain and human dealing. I think that he will not write or speak inspiringly; but he is a refreshing forward-looking and forward-moving man, and he has naturalized and humanized New York for me. He actually reproaches you by his respect for your poor words. I had three hours’ solid talk with him, and he asks me to make free use of his house.168
But he was not happy with his situation.
I do not feel myself especially serviceable to the good people with whom I live, except as inflictions are sanctified to the righteous. And so, too, must I serve the boy. I can look to the Latin and mathematics sharply, and for the rest behave myself. But I cannot be in his neighborhood hereafter as his Educator, of course, but as the hawks fly over my own head. I am not attracted toward him but as to youth generally. He shall frequent me, however, as much as he can, and I’ll be I.169
When he received a letter from Lidian in June, he started reading it but decided to go
to the top of the hill at sunset, where I can see the ocean, to prepare to read the rest. It is fitter that it should hear it than the walls of my chamber. . . . I am almost afraid to look at your letter. . . .
You seem to me to speak out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. Your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens as from the paper.170
It is clear from his answer to Lidian that they shared an emotional intimacy that each sometimes failed to find in Emerson, and that there was a confidence and trust that, again, they missed in Emerson. “My dear friend,” Thoreau wrote her, “it was very noble in you to write me so trustful an answer. It will do as well for another world as for this.” They were connected. “I think I know your thoughts without seeing you, and as well here as in Concord. You are not at all strange to me.” She confided to him about her “sad hours,” the result of some physical ailment. In closing he expressed the “joy your letter gives me,” and sent his “love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness I slowly recognize.”171
In September, among other local news, Emerson lamented the conditions of the Irish laborers who had come to lay down the tracks for the railroad that would be extending past Walden Pond to Fitchburg.
Now the humanity of the town suffers with the poor Irish, who receives but sixty, or even fifty cents, for working from dark till dark, with a strain and a following up that reminds one of negro-driving. Peter Hutchinson told me he had never seen men perform so much; he should never think it hard again if an employer should keep him at work till after sundown. But what can be done for their relief as long as new applicants for the same labor are coming in every day? These of course reduce the wages to the sum that will suffice a bachelor to live, and must drive out the men with families. The work goes on very fast.172
Thoreau may not have felt Emerson’s sympathy went far enough. Although he didn’t do it, Emerson briefly contemplated selling his home in Concord. Thoreau told his friend, “The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins and pigs and children revelling in the genial Concord dirt, and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.”173
In mid-November Thoreau was in Concord to spend Thanksgiving with his family and to give a lecture. He was back in New York the first week of December, but his brief visit home may have been an overwhelming reminder of what he was missing; in two weeks he returned home to Concord for good. He asked Emerson to tie up any loose ends with his brother; Emerson sent William thanks from Thoreau “for the purse and says that the Pindar he will return through me, and says that he left nothing of any value at all in his chamber. You will please use your discretion with any matters found there.”174
Although the New York adventure did not yield the results everyone had hoped for, Thoreau did have two pieces published outside The Dial—“A Walk to Wachusett” in the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion and “Paradise (to be) Regained” in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. “I could heartily wish,” Emerson wrote his friend while still in New York, “that this country, which seems all opportunity, did actually offer more distinct and just rewards of labor to that unhappy class of men who have more reason and conscience than strength of back and of arm.”175 Soon Thoreau would enter a new phase in his writing career, a prolific period in which he wrote, or began to write, his two most famous works: Walden and “Civil Disobedience.”
“It matters not how small the beginning may seem to be,” Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience.”176 His move to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, was just such a small beginning. His noting of the event was inauspicious. “Yesterday I came here to live,”177 he wrote in his journal the next day. That he moved on the anniversary of American independence has been touted as Thoreau’s own day of independence, which may be little more than academic mythologizing. A more personal reason may have prompted his timing, and his claim that its falling on Independence Day was an “accident”178 is more truth than literary device. Thoreau went to Walden Pond to write a book commemorating his brother. By moving in on the fourth of July he would awaken to see the sun rise on his new life at the Pond on the morning of what would have been John’s thirtieth birthday.
Walden Woods was marginal land. Not arable, it was good only for woodlots. The land on which Thoreau built his house was one of Emerson’s lots, and he was able to live on his friend’s land in exchange for the same type of labor and help he gave when living in the Emerson household. The woods were also home to people who, in their own way, were marginal to Concord society: the Irish building the railroad, the formerly enslaved, alcoholics, those simply called lurkers, and now Henry David Thoreau. It was no wonder people made “very particular inquiries” concerning his life there.179 When people asked what he was doing there, he presented a lecture, “A History of Myself,” before the Concord Lyceum. This became the foundation for Walden.
Thoreau woke with the sun, and his days might include a morning bath in the pond, a period for reading and writing, hoeing his bean field, a long walk through the woods botanizing and observing, a second bath or afternoon swim. He might row out on the pond or the river, playing his flute, visit friends and family in Concord, or receive visitors at his house by the Pond, take a night walk, and occasionally answer the call of Emerson.
During his first winter at the Pond, out from under Emerson’s roof, Thoreau began writing brief assessments of Emerson in his journal, such as: “Emerson does not consider things in respect to their essential utility, but an important partial and relative one, as works of art perhaps. His probes pass one side of their centre of gravity. His exaggeration is of a part, not of the whole.”180
In a year’s time Thoreau completed a draft of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which Emerson was already touting as “a seven days’ voyage in as many chapters, pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot, broad and deep as Menu.”181
