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Lidian had been unwell for a month, but Emerson had not known until Thoreau finally informed him of her slow recovery.
Lidian is too unwell to write to you and so I must tell you what I can about the children, and herself. I am afraid she has not told you how unwell she is, today perhaps we may say—has been. She has been confined to her chamber four or five weeks, and three or four weeks, at least to her bed—with the jaundice, accompanied with constant nausea, which makes life intolerable to her. This added to her general ill health has made her very sick. She is as yellow as saffron. The Doctor, who comes once a day does not let her read (nor can she now) nor hear much reading. She has written her letters to you till recently sitting up in bed—but he said that he would not come again if she did so. She has Abby and Almira to take care of her, and Mrs. Brown to read to her, and I also occasionally have something to read or to say. The Doctor says she must not expect to “take any comfort of her life” for a week or two yet.242
Toward the end of March things had come to a sudden impasse, with a slowly recovering Lidian writing her husband, “Henry is well, but won’t write to you. I suppose because you don’t write to him.”243 But letters crossed in the mails. As Lidian’s letter was crossing the ocean, a letter from Waldo was on its way to Henry, beginning, “Your letter was very welcome.”244 Whatever may have caused this lapse is not clear from any extant correspondence. In May Thoreau wrote, “I am glad to find that you are expecting a line from me, since I have a better excuse for sending this hard scrawl.”245 When Emerson sailed home in July, landing in Boston at the end of the month, Thoreau lost no time in leaving Bush and moving back to his family’s house.
Emerson was, perhaps they both were, cautious about renewing their friendship to its previous level after Emerson’s return from Europe. “Henry Thoreau is like the wood-god,” Emerson wrote shortly after his return, “who solicits the wandering poet and draws him into ‘antres vast and desarts idle,’ and bereaves him of his memory, and leaves him naked, plaiting vines and with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the end is want and madness.”246 It took some time before whatever issues they had experienced were resolved, or forgiven, or forgotten.
Thoreau was writing in his journal that he did “not feel permanently related to any one,”247 and “When we separate finally and completely from one who has been our friend we separate with content—and without grief—as gently and naturally as night passes into day.”248 But Emerson did not show any similar concern that their friendship was permanently ruptured. He continued to do what he could for Thoreau’s career. “I was at South Danvers,” Emerson wrote Thoreau in early 1850,
and promised Mr. C. Northend, Secretary of the Lyceum, to invite you for Monday 18th Feb. to read a lecture to his institution. I told him there were two lectures to describe Cape Cod, which interested him and his friends, and they hoped that the two might somehow be rolled into one to give them some sort of complete story of the journey. I hope it will not quite discredit my negotiation if I confess that they heard with joy that Concord people laughed till they cried, when it was read to them. . . . They will pay your expenses, and $10.00. . . . Do go if you can.249
Any internal conflict they were feeling toward each other may have been more on Thoreau’s side. With Emerson, there remained a complete trust. “I leave town tomorrow,” he wrote in 1850, “and must beg you, if any question arises between Mr. Bartlett and me, in regard to boundary lines, to act as my attorney, and I will be bound by any agreement you shall make.”250 When tragedy struck, any differences, real or imagined, were put aside.
On May 17, 1850, Margaret Fuller, her husband, Giovanni Ossoli, and their young son, Angelo, boarded the ship Elizabeth in Italy, heading home to America. The ship ran aground as it approached Fire Island off the coast of New York on July 19. Fuller, her husband, and their child all drowned. Emerson sent Thoreau to discover what remains he could, whether corporeal or literary. By the time news had reached Concord and Thoreau had reached Fire Island, there was little hope of recovering either. Thoreau wrote to Emerson from Fire Island, describing the wreck and what little he found.
I am writing this at the house of Smith Oakes, within one mile of the wreck. He is the one who rendered the most assistance. . . . Mr. Oakes and wife tell me (all the survivors came or were brought directly to their house) that the ship struck at 10 minutes after 4 AM. and all hands, being mostly in their night clothes made haste to the forecastle—the water coming in at once. There they remained, the passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it doing what they could. Every wave lifted the forecastle roof and washed over those within. The first man got ashore at 9, many from 9 to noon—. At floodtide about 3½ o’clock when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast with her hands over her knees—her husband and child already drowned—a great wave came and washed her off. . . .
I have visited the child’s grave. . . .
In the meanwhile I shall do what I can to recover property and obtain particulars hereabouts.251
Thoreau wrote to H.G.O. Blake on his return about “a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,—an actual button,—and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.”252 The importance of thought over all else, including human companionship, seemed to form from the loss he witnessed on Fire Island, as well as his perceived loss of his friendship with Emerson.
About a month after he returned from Fire Island, Thoreau told Emerson that people were less interesting than Nature.253 “I do not know but a pine wood,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. I am more sure to come away from it cheered, than from those who come nearest to being my friends.”254 Nature became a substitute for what he failed to find on a personal level.
I love nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world was all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this. None of the joys she supplies is subject to his rules and definitions. What he touches he taints. In thought he moralizes. One would think that no free, joyful labor was possible to him. How infinite and pure the least pleasure of which Nature is basis, compared with the congratulation of mankind! The joy which Nature yields is like that afforded by the frank words of one we love.255
This idea culminated in his 1857 statement that “All nature is my bride.”256 Early in the next year he wrote that it had been “long since a human friend has met me with such a glow”
