Solid Seasons. Jeffrey S. Cramer
and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure, or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the melody runs into such depth and wildness as to be no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times, for then the music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.59
In February of 1841 he wrote,
Wait not till I invite thee, but observe
I’m glad to see thee when thou com’st.60
Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx” was published in the first issue of The Dial. In March Thoreau began a long journal entry analyzing Emerson’s poem stanza by stanza, sometimes using the poem as a starting point for a more personal inquiry. Emerson wrote in his poem,
Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?—
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.
Eterne alternation
Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure,—
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.61
After reading these lines Thoreau wrote, “In friendship each will be nobler than the other, and so avoid the cheapness of a level and idle harmony. Love will have its chromatic strains,—discordant yearnings for higher chords,—as well as symphonies. Let us expect no finite satisfaction.”62
In mid-March 1841 Emerson gave copies of Essays to family and friends, including Thoreau, likely prompting Thoreau’s poem “Friendship”—one of several given that title—written that month.
Now we are partners in such legal trade,
We’ll look to the beginnings, not the ends,
Nor to pay-day, knowing true wealth is made
For current stock and not for dividends.63
There was consideration in early 1841 of the Alcotts moving in with the Emersons, but such plans were dropped—much to Abigail “Abba” Alcott’s relief—when Samuel May, Abba’s brother, promised to provide for the family. With this prospect out of the way, Emerson invited Thoreau to move in with them and Thoreau agreed. In exchange for room and board, Thoreau would provide a few hours of “what labor he chooses to do.”64 Emerson’s cook at the time did not understand or appreciate the arrangement, saying that Thoreau wasn’t “worth his porridge to do the chores.”65 For Emerson, however, he was “a very skilful laborer and I work with him as I should not without him.”66 Such an arrangement—one Thoreau instead of six Alcotts—must have seemed fortuitous to both the Emersons.
In addition to physical labor, though, Thoreau was given opportunities that would be beneficial to a young writer, and these would have been part of Emerson’s plan from the first in inviting Thoreau into his household: working on The Dial, proofing Emerson’s texts, being fully integrated into Emerson’s intellectual and literary circle. Shortly after his move, Thoreau wrote in his journal,
At R.W.Es.
The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it, and roof and floor and walls support themselves, as the sky and trees and earth.
It is a great art to saunter.67
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