In the spring of 1840 Emerson had been working on pieces that would form his first series of Essays. In June he was finishing up his essay on friendship, which he would place in the center of his book, as Thoreau would do when placing his own friendship essay in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Emerson’s essay contains the realization with which he wrestled his entire life: “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”52
He was writing so much that he told Fuller he had “become a scrivener.”53 At the end of June, Emerson and Thoreau visited the Cliffs at Fair Haven for what Emerson called their “villeggiatura,” a country holiday, perhaps a well-deserved break from his book. Emerson’s journal entry for that date started with a view of his surroundings—“I saw nothing better than the passage of the river by the dark clump of trees that line the bank in one spot for a short distance”—before commenting on friendship.
We chide the citizen because, with all his honest merits, he does not conceive the delicacies and nobility of friendship, but we cannot forgive the poet if he does not substantiate his fine romance by the municipal virtues of justice, fidelity and pity. . . .
I think we must give up this superstition of company to spend weeks and fortnights. Let my friend come and say that he has to say, and go his way. Otherwise we live for show. That happens continually in my house, that I am expected to play tame lion by readings and talkings to the friends. The rich live for show: I will not.54
Thoreau’s journal at this same time shows a yearning combined with disappointment. Entries leading up to their holiday were anticipative and sanguine. “We will warm us at each other’s fire,” he wrote,55 followed two days later by “Our friend’s is as holy a shrine as any God’s, to be approached with sacred love and awe. Veneration is the measure of Love.”56 But subsequently he wrote, “Of all phenomena, my own race are the most mysterious and undiscoverable. For how many years have I striven to meet one, even on common manly ground, and have not succeeded!”57 He had begun to see, as he would say in a different context, “the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment.”58
Feeling out of step with Emerson, Thoreau wrote the first version of what would evolve into his most renowned quotation about the different drummer.
A man’s life should be a stately march to a sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure, or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the melody runs into such depth and wildness as to be no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times, for then the music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.59
In February of 1841 he wrote,
Wait not till I invite thee, but observe
I’m glad to see thee when thou com’st.60
Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx” was published in the first issue of The Dial. In March Thoreau began a long journal entry analyzing Emerson’s poem stanza by stanza, sometimes using the poem as a starting point for a more personal inquiry. Emerson wrote in his poem,
Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?—
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.
Eterne alternation
Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure,—
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.61
After reading these lines Thoreau wrote, “In friendship each will be nobler than the other, and so avoid the cheapness of a level and idle harmony. Love will have its chromatic strains,—discordant yearnings for higher chords,—as well as symphonies. Let us expect no finite satisfaction.”62
In mid-March 1841 Emerson gave copies of Essays to family and friends, including Thoreau, likely prompting Thoreau’s poem “Friendship”—one of several given that title—written that month.
Now we are partners in such legal trade,
We’ll look to the beginnings, not the ends,
Nor to pay-day, knowing true wealth is made
For current stock and not for dividends.63
There was consideration in early 1841 of the Alcotts moving in with the Emersons, but such plans were dropped—much to Abigail “Abba” Alcott’s relief—when Samuel May, Abba’s brother, promised to provide for the family. With this prospect out of the way, Emerson invited Thoreau to move in with them and Thoreau agreed. In exchange for room and board, Thoreau would provide a few hours of “what labor he chooses to do.”64 Emerson’s cook at the time did not understand or appreciate the arrangement, saying that Thoreau wasn’t “worth his porridge to do the chores.”65 For Emerson, however, he was “a very skilful laborer and I work with him as I should not without him.”66 Such an arrangement—one Thoreau instead of six Alcotts—must have seemed fortuitous to both the Emersons.
In addition to physical labor, though, Thoreau was given opportunities that would be beneficial to a young writer, and these would have been part of Emerson’s plan from the first in inviting Thoreau into his household: working on The Dial, proofing Emerson’s texts, being fully integrated into Emerson’s intellectual and literary circle. Shortly after his move, Thoreau wrote in his journal,
At R.W.Es.
The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth.
It
