“But Mamma,” Waldo suggested, “I am afraid it will alarm you. It may sound in the middle of the night, and it will be heard all over the town; it will be louder than ten thousand hawks; it will be heard across the water, and in all the countries. It will be heard all over the world. It will sound like some great glass thing which falls down and breaks all to pieces.”107
The following month Emerson wrote to his childless friend Carlyle: “You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away.”108
Although Emerson wrote in “Experience” that “Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me,”109 Margaret Fuller saw a loneliness that remained. Two years after Waldo’s death she wrote Emerson, “I know you are not a ‘marker of days’ nor do in any way encourage those useless pains which waste the strength needed for our nobler purposes, yet it seems to me this season can never pass without opening anew the deep wound. . . . I miss him when I go to your home, I miss him when I think of you there; you seem to me lonely as if he filled you to a place which no other ever could in any degree.” She exhibited an understanding and perspective rare for the mid-nineteenth century. She recognized that “Little Edith has been injured in my affections by being compared with him. . . . I do not like to have her put in his place or likened to him; that only makes me feel that she is not the same and do her injustice.” Even more to the point she told her friend, “I hope you will have another son, for I perceive that men do not feel themselves represented to the next generation by daughters, but I hope, if you do, there will be no comparisons made . . .”110
Emerson’s reply reflected none of Fuller’s concerns for his other children, living or yet to be born. Instead he wrote of his still-present pain, telling Fuller that when Lidian said, “‘It is two years today—’ I only heard the bell-stroke again. I have had no experiences no progress to put me into better intelligence with my calamity than when it was new.”111
When Emerson’s house burned thirty years later, friends and neighbors worked hurriedly to save what they could. Emerson collected together the letters of his first wife, Ellen, along with Waldo’s clothes that he had kept. He was not making a desperate effort to save those relics of lost loved ones. It was the opposite. His daughter described how her father gathered those personal objects and then “deliberately threw them into the fire.”112 With those gestures Emerson threw the last vestiges of Ellen and Waldo into the burning Bush.
When Emerson was lecturing in New York a few months after Waldo died, Lidian wrote him, including “an extract from a letter Henry sent this week to” her sister, Lucy Jackson Brown. “I did not know it was there till I had written some lines—but will not tear it from the sheet since you may like it as well as I do—and if so it will cheer your loneliness.”113 Thoreau wrote,
As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die every autumn? He had not even taken root here. I was not startled to hear that he was dead; it seemed the most natural event that could happen. His fine organization demanded it, and nature gently yielded its request. It would have been strange if he had lived. Neither will nature manifest any sorrow at his death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dandelions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer.114
Lidian asked Thoreau to send Emerson
a letter by this opportunity—and he seems quite ready to do so. He had a sick headache about the time you went away, and has not been quite well since,—has had a cold and weak eyes—and some return of spasmodic affection. But is very bright and interesting and beguiles what time he can do nought else in with playing on the flute. He finds that exercise, which he hoped would be a relief—only increases his ails—so that I have begged him not to feel the care of the wood—and have had Colombe to work one day upon it—as we were in need both of green and dry hard wood.115
On March 11 Henry wrote a long letter that contained some thoughts on death.
Nature is not ruffled by the rudest blast—The hurricane only snaps a few twigs in some nook of the forest. The snow attains its average depth each winter, and the chicadee lisps the same notes. The old laws prevail in spite of pestilence and famine. No genius or virtue so rare and revolutionary appears in town or village, that the pine ceases to exude resin in the wood, or beast or bird lays aside its habits.
How plain that death is only the phenomenon of the individual or class. Nature does not recognize it, she finds her own again under new forms without loss. Yet death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident—It is as common as life. Men die in Tartary, in Ethiopia—in England—in Wisconsin. And after all what portion of this so serene and living nature can be said to be alive? Do this year’s grasses and foliage outnumber all the past?
Every blade in the field—every leaf in the forest—lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. It is the pastime of a full quarter of the year. Dead trees—sere leaves—dried grass and herbs—are not these a good part of our life? And what is that pride of our autumnal scenery but the hectic flush—the sallow and cadaverous countenance of vegetation—its painted throes—with the November air for canvas—
When we look over the fields are we not saddened because these particular flowers or grasses will wither—for the law of their death is the law of new life. Will not the land be in good heart because the crops die down from year to year? The herbage cheerfully consents to bloom, and wither, and give place to a new.
So is it with the human plant. We are partial and selfish when we lament the death of the individual, unless our plaint be a paean to the departed soul, and a sigh as the wind sighs over the fields, which no shrub interprets into its private grief.
One might as well go into mourning for every sere leaf—but the more innocent and wiser soul will snuff a fragrance in the gales of autumn, and congratulate Nature upon her health.
After I have imagined thus much will not the Gods feel under obligations to make me realize something as good?116
The naturalness of dying expressed here, in relation to both recent deaths, would resurface when Thoreau was redacting “Autumnal Tints” on his deathbed: “How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.”117
Thoreau prefaced his letter with a nod to the impasse they had reached in their relationship, the difficulty of speaking about personal matters face-to-face, by saying that
there seems to be no occasion why I who have so little to say to you here at home should take pains to send you any of my silence in a letter—Yet since no correspondence can hope to rise above the level of those homely speechless hours, as no spring ever bursts above the level of
