style="font-size:15px;"> From Emerson’s description, “Henry Thoreau is coming to live with me and work with me in the garden and teach me to graft apples,”68 Margaret Fuller reduced Thoreau to simply Emerson’s “working-man this year.”69 Emerson, however, thought of him in broader terms, describing him to Thomas Carlyle as “a poet whom you may one day be proud of;—a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions,”70 and to his brother as “a scholar and a poet and as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree.”71
Emerson suffered from periods of unidentified complaints. “We have all been feebler folk,”72 he wrote of his family, and more specifically about himself, that he had “been such a hypochondriac lately with my indispositions.”73 Although he looked forward to when “the South Wind returns,—the woods and fields and my garden will heal me,”74 he saw Thoreau as a “great benefactor and physician to me,” and expected “now to be suddenly well and strong though I have been a skeleton all the spring until I am ashamed.”75
When the two friends boated on the Concord River that summer, Emerson described “my valiant Thoreau” as “the good river-god” who
introduced me to the riches of his shadowy, starlit, moonlit stream, a lovely new world lying as close and yet as unknown to this vulgar trite one of the streets and shops as death to life, or poetry to prose. Through one field only we went to the boat and then left all time, all science, all history, behind us, and entered into Nature with one stroke of a paddle. Take care, good friend! I said, as I looked west into the sunset overhead and underneath, and he with his face toward me rowed towards it,—take care; you know not what you do, dipping your wooden oar into this enchanted liquid, painted with all reds and purples and yellows, which glows under and behind you. Presently this glory faded, and the stars came and said, “Here we are”; began to cast such private and ineffable beams as to stop all conversation.76
Thoreau eagerly awaited correspondence when the friends were apart. Lidian wrote to her husband and emphasized that “Henry seems joyful when there is news from you.”77
As their friendship progressed, Emerson became ever more anticipatory of what Thoreau would accomplish, and although he recognized that “all the fine souls have a flaw which defeats every expectation they excite,” he also found that “to have awakened a great hope in another, is already some fruit is it not?”78 Even in the early days Emerson exacted high expectations of what he had hoped to discover in Thoreau, telling him “that his freedom is in the form, but he does not disclose new matter. . . . But if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was created to say.”79
By October Emerson was indicating a nascent strain in their relationship, admiring Thoreau as “a person of extraordinary health and vigor, of unerring perception, and equal expression,” but acknowledging that “yet he is impracticable, and does not flow through his pen or (in any of our legitimate aqueducts) through his tongue.”80 Thoreau felt a hindrance in the progress of their friendship, writing a poem that winter titled “Delay in Friendship,” which asks,
Wilt thou not wait for me my friend,
Or give a longer lease?81
Thoreau understood Emerson’s position and intent in his kindnesses and help, but at times he also may have misconstrued them.
But he goes unappeased
Who is on kindness bent.82
He may have felt that Emerson demanded something greater, had an expectation that could not be fulfilled. Thoreau was trying to establish his own voice, a voice of defiant self-reliance that asked, “If I am not I, who will be?”83
Whatever temporary impasse these friends may have been experiencing, something unexpected brought them a shared and overpowering grief when the beginning of 1842 saw tragedy strike both the Thoreau and Emerson families. “I begin my letter,” Lidian wrote her sister, “with the strange sad news that John Thoreau has this afternoon left this world.”84 John had cut his left-hand thumb while stropping his razor on New Year’s Day. Not thinking it serious, he replaced the missing skin and bandaged it. Although within a few days it began to cause him pain, not until January 8 did he actually remove the bandage. The flesh was foul smelling, discolored, and darkened. Gangrene had set in.
The skin had already begun to mortify when John visited Dr. Josiah Bartlett that Saturday evening. The Concord physician examined and redressed the wound. Although his father, also Dr. Josiah Bartlett, had written a pamphlet in 1808 on tetanus and the use of amputation as a cure, Bartlett did not find any reason for concern. There are no medical records to explain why he was not alarmed. On his way home John began to experience pain in various parts of his body. He was barely able to complete the one-third-mile walk. By morning his jaw was stiff. Excruciating spasms that evening confirmed the onset of lockjaw. Thoreau was called home from the Emersons’.
On Monday, the doctor told John that it was too late for anything to be done, and that his death would be quick but painful. “Is there no hope?” he asked. The doctor replied simply, “None,” to which John said, “The cup that my Father gives me, shall I not drink it?” Lidian reported that John retained “his senses and some power of speech to the last. He said from the first he knew he should die—but was perfectly quiet and trustful—saying that God had always been good to him and he could trust Him now. His words and behavior throughout were what Mr. Emerson calls manly—even great.”85
Later that day John took leave of his family, all but his brother. Henry remained when everyone else had left the room. He sat down and talked, as John had asked him to do, about nature and poetry. “I shall be a good listener,” he said with what strength and humor he could muster, “for it is difficult for me to interrupt you.” The next day, in his final hour, John looked at his brother with what Thoreau described as a “transcendental smile full of Heaven,”86 although it was likely the risus sardonicus caused by muscle spasms. Henry returned a smile. This was the last that passed between them. John died on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 in his brother’s arms.
In the evening Thoreau walked the half mile to Emerson’s house to see his friend, “but no one else,” as Lidian wrote. One does not know, one can only imagine, the conversation that took place behind the closed doors of Emerson’s study. The death of Thoreau’s brother could only have stirred memories of Emerson’s own fraternal losses. His brother Edward died in 1834 and, more parallel to Thoreau’s loss, Charles in 1836. He had described Charles to Lidian as “my noble friend who was my ornament my wisdom and my pride. . . . How much I saw through his eyes. I feel as if my own were very dim.”87
