Solid Seasons. Jeffrey S. Cramer
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 the still mountain tarn whence it issued—I will not delay to send a venture. As if I were to send you a piece of the house-sill—or a loose casement rather. Do not neighbors sometimes halloo with good will across a field, who yet never chat over a fence?118
Thoreau thought Emerson’s coolness and reserve was “because his love for me is waxing and not waning. . . . Heaven is to come. I hope this is not it.”119 Emerson was aware of his own coolness, confessing in his journal in 1843, “It is a pathetic thing to meet a friend prepared to love you, to whom yet, from some inaptitude, you cannot communicate yourself with that grace and power which only love will allow.”120 There was an explosion of writing about friendship as Thoreau tried to work it out in his journal. “Words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud to cloud.” He didn’t want
friends to feed and clothe our bodies,—neighbors are kind enough for that,—but to do the like offices to ourselves. We wish to spread and publish ourselves, as the sun spreads its rays; and we toss the new thought to the friend, and thus it is dispersed. Friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. Each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. All beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism but real unity. My friend is my real brother. I see his nature groping yonder like my own. Does there go one whom I know? then I go there.
The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here. As the Indian thinks he receives into himself the courage and strength of his conquered enemy, so we add to ourselves all the character and heart of our friends. He is my creation. I can do what I will with him. There is no possibility of being thwarted; the friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts.
The friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be ground enough for friendship.121
In April Emerson asked Thoreau to write a review of some scientific surveys of Massachusetts he had been reading. He told Fuller that he had “set Henry Thoreau on the good track of giving an account of them in the Dial, explaining to him the felicity of the subject for him as it admits of the narrative of all his woodcraft, boatcraft and fishcraft.” It was his constant wish to bring Thoreau’s work to a wider audience, and “as private secretary to the President of the Dial, his works and fame may go out into all lands, and, as happens to great Premiers, quite extinguish the titular Master.”122 Thoreau’s “Natural History of Massachusetts” was published in the next issue of The Dial.
As 1842 drew to a close, Thoreau, Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had a skating party on the frozen meadow next to the Old Manse. Sophia Hawthorne described Thoreau’s “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice—very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air.”123
In his “Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,” Emerson noted, “It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings.”124 Thoreau signed off from the First Parish Church in Concord at the beginning of 1841, writing simply to the clerk, “I do not wish to be considered a member of the First Parish in this town.”125 God was not to be found in the formal tenets of organized religion. God was not to be found confined between the walls of a church with a ministerial mediator. God was not to be found weekly on Sundays with the Sabbatarians.
As Emerson wrote in his Divinity College address, “In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?”126 Or as he wrote later in “Politics”: “The wise man . . . needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet.”