Solid Seasons. Jeffrey S. Cramer
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 of my bed?”
“Yes,” his mother answered, “it may stand there.”
“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