What was said in the privacy of Emerson’s study is not recorded in the journals or correspondence of either man, although parts of it may have been conveyed to Lidian, who wrote,
He says John took leave of all the family on Monday with perfect calmness and more than resignation. It is a beautiful fate that has been granted him and I think he was worthy of it. At first it seemed not beautiful but terrible. Since I have heard particulars and recollected all the good I have heard of him I feel as if a pure spirit had been translated.88
When Lidian later asked Thoreau “if this sudden fate gave any shock to John when he first was aware of his danger,” he answered, “None at all.”89 It had been John’s belief that he would die early.90
The following morning Thoreau returned to Bush to get his clothes, unsure when he would return as a member of the Emerson household. Before noon he was back on Main Street with his family. Lidian loved “him for the feeling he showed and the effort he made to be cheerful. He did not give way in the least but his whole demeanour was that of one struggling with sickness of heart.”91 This sickness of heart with which Thoreau struggled would soon surface in a way that caused considerable alarm to his family and friends.
Edward Emerson remembered being told that the “shock, the loss, and the sight of his brother’s terrible suffering at the end, for a time overthrew Henry so utterly that . . . he sat still in the house, could do nothing, and his sisters led him out passive to try to help him.”92 Thoreau’s depression soon manifested itself physically. On Saturday, January 22, Emerson returned to Concord from Boston, where he had delivered the last lecture of his series “On the Times,” only to find his friend “ill and threatened with lockjaw! his brother’s disease. It is strange—unaccountable—yet the symptoms seemed precise and on the increase. You may judge we were all alarmed and I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth.”93
By Monday Emerson could write that Thoreau’s “affection be it what it may, is relieved essentially, and what is best, his own feeling of better health established.”94 It was a slow process. “I must confess,” Thoreau wrote in his journal, “there is nothing so strange to me as my own body. I love any other piece of nature, almost, better.”95 A month later Lidian was writing that “Henry is better—nearly well. But his headache or the cause of it, made his eyes so weak that he did not read or write much for two days or more.”96 Good health still wasn’t totally restored. In March Thoreau wrote that he had been “confined to my chamber for a month with a prolonged shock of the same disorder—from close attention to, and sympathy with him, which I learn is not without precedent.”97 A year later, on the anniversary of John’s death, Thoreau asked in his journal, “What am I at present?” He answered, “A diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf that still hangs shivering on its stem.”98
The relief Emerson experienced over his friend’s returning health that January was brief. Waldo, Emerson’s five-year-old son, showed signs of scarlet fever. It began with a soreness of the throat and a fever. Eruptions on the skin appeared, similar to measles but occurring more rapidly, yet following the eruptions the fever did not begin to subside as with measles. Waldo’s skin took on broad patches of the vivid red color that gave the disease its name. Seizures were followed by delirium. His “sweet and wonderful boy,” Emerson wrote Carlyle, was “hurried out of my arms in three short days by Scarlatina.”99
When Alcott sent his daughter, the nine-year-old Louisa, to ask after Waldo’s health, it would be one of her earliest remembrances of Emerson and one she would not forget. He came to the door looking “so worn with watching, and changed by sorrow, that I was startled, and could only stammer out my message.” He simply answered, “Child, he is dead,” and closed the door. Louisa ran home to tell her family the news. She later recollected that it was “my first glimpse of a great grief; but I never have forgotten the anguish that made a familiar face so tragical, and gave those few words more pathos than the sweet lamentation of” Emerson’s poetic requiem for his son, “Threnody.”100
For a period following Waldo’s death, Emerson saw the world only in relation to his son. “What he looked upon is better,” he wrote on January 30, “what he looked not upon is insignificant.” On waking he found that the sun had risen as usual “with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy.”101
Until this time Emerson had relied on his intellect to carry him through a crisis. Even the death of his first wife, Ellen, and his brother Charles had not brought him to this place. The pretense, based on his previous experiences of death, was shaken; he had once confessed, “if my wife, my child, my mother, should be taken from me, I should still remain whole, with the same capacity of cheap enjoyment from all things. I should not grieve enough, although I love them.”102 Now, however, he admitted simply in his journal, “The wisest knows nothing.”103 The ideas expressed in his essay “Compensation”—“The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.”104—did little to assuage the pain he was currently feeling. In an undated, and later cancelled, journal entry from 1843, Emerson wrote down Lidian’s wish that she had never been born, followed by her statement with which he must have been in agreement, “I do not see how God can compensate me for the sorrow of existence.”105 He could not anticipate a return to the comfort expressed in his poem “Give All to Love,” in which he wrote that
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.106
In an effort to capture what he had lost, Emerson began to collect little bits of Waldo’s conversations in his journal. It was his way of dealing with the dead and the dying, and he would do it again when Margaret Fuller drowned, and later when Thoreau was dying. He remembered the fanciful names Waldo gave to the parts of the toy house he was always building, such as the Interspeglium and the Coridaga. Once when Waldo asked if there were other countries besides the United States and his father began to name them, Thoreau commented on the boy’s large way of speech that offered questions that “did not admit of an answer; they were the same which you would ask yourself.” When it happened to thunder while Waldo was blowing his willow whistle, he said that his music “makes the thunder dance.”
One time he asked Lidian, “Mamma, may I have this bell which I have been making, to stand by the side
