million words, Emerson’s over three million. For both men, journals were the work of a lifetime but not their life’s work. They laid the groundwork for the lectures and essays and books that were to follow. When Thoreau and Emerson combed their journals for material, it mattered little when, where, or even what circumstance had prompted an entry, as long as the text reflected the theme of what they were currently writing. “It is surely foolish,” Emerson expressed in his journal, “to adhere rigidly to the order of time in putting down one’s thoughts, and to neglect the order of thought. I put like things together.”19
Emerson considered his journal his “Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition.”20 It was similar for Thoreau. “Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg,” he wrote, “by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal,—that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves.”21
Their work habits, however, were quite different. Emerson wrote that Thoreau “knew but one secret, which was to do one thing at a time, and though he has his evenings for study, if he was in the day inventing machines for sawing his plumbago, he invents wheels all the evening and night also; and if this week he has some good reading and thoughts before him, his brain runs on that all day, whilst pencils pass through his hands.” Emerson found in himself “an opposite facility or perversity, that I never seem well to do a particular work until another is due. I cannot write the poem, though you give me a week, but if I promise to read a lecture the day after to-morrow, at once the poem comes into my head and now the rhymes will flow. And let the proofs of the Dial be crowding on me from the printer, and I am full of faculty how to make the lecture.”22
At the end of 1837 Lidian Emerson wrote that her husband had “taken to Henry with great interest,” finding him uncommon “in mind and character.”23 It was these moments of uncommonness and originality, mixed with Thoreau’s contrariness, that often interested Emerson.
At the “teacher’s meeting” last night, my good Edmund Hosmer, after disclaiming any wish to difference Jesus from a human mind, suddenly seemed to alter his tone, and said that Jesus made the world and was the Eternal God. Henry Thoreau merely remarked that “Mr. Hosmer had kicked the pail over.” I delight much in my young friend, who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met. He told as we walked this afternoon a good story about a boy who went to school with him, Wentworth, who resisted the school mistress’s command that the children should bow to Dr. Heywood and other gentlemen as they went by, and when Dr. Heywood stood waiting and cleared his throat with a Hem, Wentworth said, “You need n’t hem, Doctor. I shan’t bow.”24
In December 1837 Emerson shared a discovery with Thoreau. The previous year he had “found a new musical instrument which I call the ice-harp. A thin coat of ice covered a part of the pond, but melted around the edge of the shore. I threw a stone upon the ice which rebounded with a shrill sound, and falling again and again, repeated the note with pleasing modulation. I thought at first it was the ‘peep, peep’ of a bird I had scared. I was so taken with the music that I threw down my stick and spent twenty minutes in throwing stones single or in handfuls on this crystal drum.”25 “My friend tells me,” Thoreau wrote, “he has discovered a new note in nature, which he calls the Ice-Harp.”26
In the following spring Thoreau described their friendship.
Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side
Withstand the winter’s storm,
And, spite of wind and tide,
Grow up the meadow’s pride,
For both are strong.
Above they barely touch, but, undermined
Down to their deepest source,
Admiring you shall find
Their roots are intertwined
Insep’rably.27
Comments about Emerson began to appear in Thoreau’s journal, but Emerson’s journal began to hold statements and stories by Thoreau, some of which Thoreau would include later in his own writings, such as the “good story” Emerson noted in September 1838 about Deacon Parkman “who lived in the house he now occupies, and kept a store close by. He hung out a salt fish for a sign, and it hung so long and grew so hard, black and deformed, that the deacon forgot what thing it was, and nobody in town knew, but being examined chemically it proved to be salt fish. But duly every morning the deacon hung it on its peg.”28 A decade later this story would be incorporated into Walden.
Even in the early years of the friendship, there were times when the assumed roles of Emerson as mentor and Thoreau as student were inverted. Their influence was, from the very beginning, mutual. Emerson recognized that “our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great.”29 Things Thoreau said or did would impress Emerson to the point that they would find their way into his work, from early essays written shortly after they met to those written after Thoreau’s death. As he confessed to his journal, “Have I said it before in these pages? then I will say it again, that it is a curious commentary on society that the expression of a devout sentiment by any young man who lives in society strikes me with surprise and has all the air and effect of genius.”30 One such moment came as he thought of his “brave Henry here who is content to live now, and feels no shame in not studying any profession, for he does not postpone his life, but lives already,—pours contempt on these crybabies of routine and Boston. He has not one chance but a hundred chances.”31 Thoreau’s ideas inform the writing of Emerson’s seminal essay, “Self-Reliance”: “He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.”32
“My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear perception,” Emerson wrote in 1838, part of which he would later incorporate into his essay on “New England Reformers.”
How comic is simplicity in this double-dealing, quacking world. Everything that boy says makes merry with society, though nothing can be graver than his meaning. I told him he should write out the history of his college life, as Carlyle has his tutoring. We agreed that the seeing the stars through a telescope would be worth all the astronomical lectures. Then he described Mr. Quimby’s electrical lecture here, and the experiment of the shock, and added that “college corporations are very blind to the fact that the twinge in the elbow is worth all the lecturing.”33
“Montaigne is spiced throughout
