Restless Souls. Leigh Eric Schmidt

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vices. The American experiment with freedom and equality, Alexis de Tocqueville warned in his classic commentary Democracy in America (1835–1840), was begetting “a novel expression” of “individualism.” The new democracy, however robust, remained vulnerable; it seemed to throw each citizen “back forever upon himself alone” and “to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” From the vantage point of a fragile republic, solitude appeared the very antithesis of a religiously cohesive nation.9

      The popular tales that circulated in the first half of the nineteenth century about more recent hermits reinforced the low and fearful standing of solitude as destitution. In the lore of contemporary wonders and marvels, hermits were known far more for lost love and unredeemed suffering than spiritual potential. Telling in this regard was Life and Adventures of Robert Voorhis, the Hermit of Massachusetts, Who Has Lived 14 Years in a Cave, Secluded from Human Society (1829), a narrative of a former slave from Princeton, New Jersey, who resided in a “solitary hermitage” close to Providence, Rhode Island. An object of local curiosity, Voorhis was thought by many to be a melancholy misanthrope, but the narrator revealed him to have been a cruelly mistreated slave, separated at age four from his mother and sister and as a young man from his wife and two children. The solitude of his “rude cell” was, Voorhis reported to his inquirer, a deliberate response to “the bitter cup of my afflictions!—afflictions which had more or less attended me through life!” To some, from the outside, the hilltop retreat might seem “a most romantic situation” as it supplied the hermit's simple wants from “the bountiful hand of nature,” but the narrator quickly disposed of that idyll. Living in a dark, cold, cramped cave was not a resource for practical Christian faith; instead, only a hope for the ultimacy of divine justice sustained Voorhis, as did the principle “that human beings, whatever might be their complexion[,] were all created equally free.” These were not religious and political convictions that he garnered from solitude, but ones he held on to despite his sorrow and separation. The life of Robert the Hermit was intended to inspire others not to devotional imitation, but to feelings of “sympathy for distress.” His narrative was expressly published as a project of benevolence to raise funds to improve his condition and to further the antislavery cause.10

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      The woes of Robert Voorhis, a former slave turned solitary, exemplified the ways in which the hermit was presented as a tragic and forlorn figure in antebellum America. (Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.)

      Other hermit narratives of the period told similarly forlorn stories of loss. John Conrad Shafford, whose tale of woe was published in 1841, spent his last fifty years living “a secluded and lonely life.” He was driven to it through “being deprived of an only child, a beloved daughter,” who was taken captive by Indians at age fifteen and who died “a wretched victim of their barbarity.” Three months later he was “bereaved of my wife” as well, and so, like Robert, this “Dutch Hermit” had chosen “solitary retreat” as a result of “heavy afflictions.” As one spiritual guide of the period put it, “The grieved heart, like the wounded deer, retreats into solitude to bleed.”11

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      Ruinous calamity also marked the life of Sarah Bishop, popularly known as the Hermitess. (Firestone Library, Princeton University.)

      Similarly tragic was Sarah Bishop's story. During the American Revolution, British soldiers plundered her family's home on Long Island, and she “was made a victim of one of those demoniac acts, which in peace are compensated by the gibbet, but which, in war, embellish the life of the soldier.” Bishop fled the shame of her rape and apparently lived in a desolate cave for most of the next three decades. Both Shafford and Bishop were reputed to take consolation in their gloom from reading precious (if tattered) copies of the Bible, and so both could be pictured as looking beyond this vale of tears to “a brighter and happier existence.” In neither case was solitude thought to be the vehicle for spiritual attainment, however; instead, it was an isolated state of grief that was partially assuaged through the otherworldly vision of the Scriptures. When Walt Whitman actually met “a real hermit” in “one of my rambles,” he projected only heartache upon him and his “lonesome spot,” remarking that the man “did not unbosom his life, or story, or tragedy.”12

      The Protestant suspicion of monasticism and the pained commiseration of reform-minded benefactors were less than promising bases for Thoreau's revaluing of solitude. Pity and Protestant polemic, however, were not the only responses that hermits evoked in the early republic; they also attracted journalistic sensation and touristic attention. Hundreds had apparently sought out Robert the Hermit, hoping to penetrate the veil of his mysterious isolation and gratify their curiosity, and Sarah Bishop, likewise, attracted those looking for a good excursion, a double marvel as “a woman hermit.” At the end of one pamphlet from 1815 titled “Remarkable Discovery of an American Hermit,” Captain James Buckland even offered to provide “particular directions for any one to go and find the Hermit, and satisfy his own curiosity” about this mournful soul and his hidden cave. The architect Harriet Morrison Irwin in her fictional tale The Hermit of Petræa had her title character remark that if Yankee travelers were to get wind of “the charmed word hermit…I should soon find myself driven out of this dear retreat of mine by sight-seers and sensation-mongers.” Not surprisingly, one of Thoreau's visitors at Walden suggested that he needed to have on display in his cabin “a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains.” Would solitude be solitude without a log of witnesses, travelers, and guests? Would solitude be recognizable without intrusion and interruption?13

      So travel, voyeurism, and curiosity provided a point of departure toward Thoreau's Transcendentalist crossroads. The hermit's cave or cabin was an attraction that carried the sensational appeal of secretiveness and mystery. One of the many nineteenth-century loners of the Adirondacks, a region rich in its interweaving of travel guides and hermit lore, doubled in the summer as a concessionaire for tourists. That did not disqualify Stewart Wilson from his reputation as the Hermit of Sacandaga Park–an embodiment of an aimless rusticity that only added to his allure for visitors. The Adirondacks, to be sure, became one of the great and lasting sources of tales about hermits and hermitages, and the park still retains that image. It is a place where hermits lurk on the edges of a visitor's peregrinations and imagination. As Sue Halpern writes at the opening of Migrations to Solitude: The Quest for Privacy in a Crowded World (1992), “Deep among the birch, some miles back from my house in the Adirondack Mountains, is a cabin where a man is said to have lived alone for a quarter century, maybe longer. Then one day, the story goes, he walked out of the woods and disappeared.” In writing her own meditations on solitude, she looked for that man in prisons and monasteries to talk to him about his experience “as a physical fact,” but, in a poetic deferral that only heightens the air of mystery and desire, she (of course) never finds him.14

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