Solid Seasons. Jeffrey S. Cramer
completed, it remained standing—another miracle—but was so drafty and visited by mosquitoes from the nearby meadow that Emerson was unable to use it.
As Thoreau re-read Emerson’s Essays in his house at Walden Pond during his second winter, he felt “that they were not poetry—that they were not written exactly at the right crisis though inconceivably near to it.”209 Thoreau attempted to assess who and what Emerson was.
Emerson again is a critic, poet, philosopher, with talent not so conspicuous, not so adequate to his task; but his field is still higher, his task more arduous. Lives a far more intense life; seeks to realize a divine life; his affections and intellect equally developed. Has advanced farther, and a new heaven opens to him. Love and Friendship, Religion, Poetry, the Holy are familiar to him. The life of an Artist; more variegated, more observing, finer perception; not so robust, elastic; practical enough in his own field; faithful, a judge of men. There is no such general critic of men and things, no such trustworthy and faithful man. More of the divine realized in him than in any. A poetic critic, reserving the unqualified nouns for the gods.210
“Emerson has special talents unequalled,” he wrote as he realized what Emerson’s true gift was. “His personal influence upon young persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”211 In this role Emerson would continue to promote Thoreau’s writings to others, writing to Thomas Carlyle in February 1847, “You are yet to read a good American book made by this Thoreau, and which shortly is to be printed, he says.”212 “Mrs. Ripley and other members of the opposition,” he wrote to Margaret Fuller, perhaps because he felt she was one of the opposition, “came down the other night to hear Henry’s Account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond, which he read as a lecture, and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all.”213
When Thoreau’s manuscript had been completed, Emerson enlisted his brother William to use his connections to find a publisher, but more to the purpose he wrote to Evert Duyckinck, one of the leading editors of the day in the New York literary scene, about Thoreau’s
book of extraordinary merit, which he wishes to publish. It purports to be the account of “An Excursion on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” which he made some time ago in company with his brother, in a boat built by themselves. The book contains about the same quantity of matter for printing as Dicken’s Pictures of Italy. I have represented to Mr. Thoreau, that his best course would undoubtedly be, to send the book to you, to be printed by Wiley & Putnam, that it may have a good edition and wide publishing.
This book has many merits. It will be as attractive to lovers of nature, in every sense, that is, to naturalists, and to poets, as Isaak Walton. It will be attractive to scholars for its excellent literature, and to all thoughtful persons for its originality and profoundness. The narrative of the little voyage, though faithful, is a very slender thread for such big beads and ingots as are strung on it. It is really a book of the results of the studies of years.
Would you like to print this book into your American Library? It is quite ready, and the whole can be sent you at once. It has never yet been offered to any publisher. If you wish to see the MS. I suppose Mr. Thoreau would readily send it to you. I am only desirous that you should propose to him good terms, and give his book the great advantages of being known which your circulation ensures.
Mr. Thoreau is the author of an Article on Carlyle, now printed and printing in Graham’s last and coming Magazine, and some papers in the Dial; but he has done nothing half so good as his new book. He is well known to Mr. Hawthorne also.214
Although Wiley & Putnam declined to publish the book at any financial risk to themselves, Duyckinck did use his influence to help garner interest. He put a notice in The Literary World, which he edited: “Henry D. Thoreau, Esq., whose elaborate paper on Carlyle, now publishing in Graham’s Magazine, is attracting considerable attention, has also completed a new work of which reports speak highly. It will probably be soon given to the public.”215
When Emerson made his first voyage to Europe in 1831, he was a young widower who had resigned his ministerial profession. He went at the urging of friends who hoped it would restore his fragile physical and mental health. Having met Wordsworth and Coleridge, and, most important, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson’s world changed, although he did not yet know in what way. His European journal shows a receptive mind, newly and continuously sparked and animated by all he experienced. People, places, and perspectives opened new ways of thinking and observing the world around him. His second voyage was at the invitation of his European friends, and although he did not like travelling and felt that long journeys did not “yield a fair share of reasonable hours,”216 he eventually and reluctantly agreed. During his first visit, he wanted to meet certain people. On his second visit, people wanted to meet him.
Before going, however, there was this question: who would take care of his family and his house in his absence? When Emerson asked Thoreau at the end of August if he were willing to move back to the Emerson house during the lecture tour, it would have been surprising had Thoreau given any answer other than yes. Based on how seminal we have historically made his time at Walden Pond, it was extraordinary how quickly Thoreau packed his bags and moved back into the town of Concord. Emerson was not sailing from Boston on the packet ship Washington Irving until October 5, yet Thoreau, rather than “suck out all the marrow”217 of his time there, left Walden precipitously on September 6, one month before he was needed in the Emerson household.
Although Thoreau could, in all probability, have returned to Walden Pond after Emerson returned from Europe, there was no reason to do so. “What is once well done,” he wrote, “is done forever.”218 There was no need to go back. He had, as he said, “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”219 It was now time for the writer’s “long probation.”220 It was the time when, as Emerson said, “experience is converted into thought.”221 Thoreau described the process in a letter to H.G.O. Blake.
Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you,—returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. . . . Going up there and being blown on is nothing. We never do much climbing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, etc., very much as at home. It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?222
Ultimately it is not the climbing of the mountain but the understanding of what that experience on the mountain means that is crucial. Similarly, his two years at Walden Pond, or his one night in jail, was in the end not as momentous and as transformative as the writing about those events. It was then that John Thoreau’s son, Henry, who walked around Concord and made pencils and surveyed land, became Thoreau, and turned a few local and personal experiences into something universally representative and profoundly significant. “Perhaps he fell,” as Emerson said all of us do, “into his way of living, without forecasting it much, but approved and confirmed it with later wisdom.”223
Sometime in the fall of 1847, forty-five-year-old Sophia Ford,224 who had joined the Alcott household