arrogance turned many away from him, both inside the Alcott family, Abba and Louisa May, and outside, Thoreau and Emerson. Emerson wrote that Lane’s “nature and influence do not invite mine, but always freeze me.”198 His account of Alcott’s arrest for The Liberator, however, must have been stimulating to Thoreau. Lane wrote that Alcott, being
convinced that the payment of the town tax involved principles and practices most degrading and injurious to man, he had long determined not to be a voluntary party to its continuance. . . .
To the county jail, therefore, Mr. Alcott went, or rather was forced by the benignant State and its delicate instrument. . . .
This act of non-resistance, you will perceive, does not rest on the plea of poverty. For Mr. Alcott has always supplied some poor neighbor with food and clothing to a much higher amount than his tax. Neither is it wholly based on the iniquitous purposes to which the money when collected is applied. For part of it is devoted to education, and education has not a heartier friend in the world than Bronson Alcott. But it is founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive principles of power and might over peace and love.199
Thoreau gave two lectures in Concord in 1848, possibly two parts of the same lecture. “The Relation of the Individual to the State” and “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to the State” explained his actions and principles to his curious neighbors. Elizabeth Peabody, planning the first issue of her Aesthetic Papers in early 1849, asked Thoreau to contribute a manuscript after hearing about one of the lectures. He wrote Peabody on April 5 that he would send “the article in question before the end of next week.” His offering “the paper to your first volume only” was moot. The journal folded after its initial issue.
A week after Thoreau’s arrest the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society held their second celebration of West Indian Emancipation at Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond. People spoke from his doorway, including Emerson. Previously Emerson had read his address “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” at the August 1844 meeting of the Society, where Frederick Douglass was also to speak. Because abolitionists had been outspoken about the clergy, they were denied use of the First Parish, and the weather prevented the use of the meadow next to the Old Manse. The Town Hall was then decided on. The town selectmen, however, would not direct the sexton to ring the meeting-house bell to alert people of the change in venue. Thoreau, “seeing the timidity of one unfortunate youth, who dared not touch the bell rope, took hold of it with a strong arm; and the bell, (though set in its own way,) pealed forth its summons right merrily.”200 Nearly twenty years later Emerson recalled the event. “I have never recorded a fact, which perhaps ought to have gone into my sketch of ‘Thoreau,’ that . . . when I read my Discourse on Emancipation [in the British West Indies], in the Town Hall, in Concord, and the selectmen would not direct the sexton to ring the meeting-house bell, Henry went himself, and rung the bell at the appointed hour.”201
In “The Method of Nature” Emerson asked, “Shall we not quit our companions, as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliff of Mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess of Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more sacred idea?”202 So when Thoreau was invited to accompany his cousin George Thatcher, who was in the lumber business in Maine and would be traveling to look at some property, he took the opportunity to make an excursion away from Walden, away from Concord, away from friends. While visiting a lumber camp, Thoreau found a copy of Emerson’s address “On the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.”203 Emerson was never far away.
In the summer of 1846 Emerson imagined a retreat of his own. He showed his selected site to both Thoreau and Alcott; Thoreau drew a diagram of a small house to which Alcott added “another story, as a lookout.”204 Although these plans were not brought to fruition, Emerson did not abandon the idea of a personal sanctuary. The following summer he decided to build a small summerhouse in the field next to Bush that could be used as a study. Thoreau, Alcott, and Emerson began cutting hemlocks for posts. Built organically from Alcott’s intuition rather than any architectural design, the house was “fashioned from gnarled limbs of pine, oak with knotty excrescences and straight trunks of cedar, a fantastic but pleasing structure. . . . feeling its way up, as it were, dictated at each step by the suggestion of the crooked bough that was used and necessarily often altered. . . . Thoreau drove the nails, and drove them well, but as Mr. Alcott made the eaves curve upward for beauty, and lined the roof with velvet moss and sphagnum, Nature soon reclaimed it.”205 While working with Alcott, Thoreau felt “he was nowhere, doing nothing.”206 Emerson’s mother called it “The Ruin.” Emerson referred to it as “Tumbledown-Hall.”207 In the fall Thoreau wrote to Emerson,
Alcott has heard that I laughed and so set the people a laughing at his arbor, though I never laughed louder than when on the ridge pole. But now I have not laughed for a long time, it is so serious. He is very grave to look at. . . . As for the building I feel a little oppressed when I come near it, it has so great a disposition to be beautiful. It is certainly a wonderful structure on the whole, and the fame of the architect will endure as long—as it shall stand.208
Miraculously completed, it remained standing—another miracle—but was so drafty and visited by mosquitoes from the nearby meadow that Emerson was unable to use it.
As Thoreau re-read Emerson’s Essays in his house at Walden Pond during his second winter, he felt “that they were not poetry—that they were not written exactly at the right crisis though inconceivably near to it.”209 Thoreau attempted to assess who and what Emerson was.
Emerson again is a critic, poet, philosopher, with talent not so conspicuous, not so adequate to his task; but his field is still higher, his task more arduous. Lives a far more intense life; seeks to realize a divine life; his affections and intellect equally developed. Has advanced farther, and a new heaven opens to him. Love and Friendship, Religion, Poetry, the Holy are familiar to him. The life of an Artist; more variegated, more observing, finer perception; not so robust, elastic; practical enough in his own field; faithful, a judge of men. There is no such general critic of men and things, no such trustworthy and faithful man. More of the divine realized in him than in any. A poetic critic, reserving the unqualified nouns for the gods.210
“Emerson has special talents unequalled,” he wrote as he realized what Emerson’s true gift was. “His personal influence upon young persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”211 In this role Emerson would continue to promote Thoreau’s writings to others, writing to Thomas Carlyle in February 1847, “You are yet to read a good American book made by this Thoreau, and which shortly is to be printed, he says.”212 “Mrs. Ripley and other members of the opposition,” he wrote to Margaret Fuller, perhaps because he felt she was one of the opposition, “came down the other night to hear Henry’s Account of his housekeeping
