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2. 1864–74: “Julian inherits the princely disposition of his father”
- University of Illinois Press
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2 1864–74 “Julian inherits the princely disposition of his father” Nathaniel left Concord on May 12, 1864, on a leisurely tour of New Hampshire with Franklin Pierce. He planned to relax in the hamlets along the way and recoup some strength. After retiring to his room in the Pemigewasset House in Plymouth the night of May 18, he seemed to sleep peacefully until , the next morning, Pierce “put his hand on his brow and found it ice,” then “laid his hand on the sleeper’s heart and found that it had stopped beating.”1 Pierce telegraphed Emerson to ask him to deliver the news in person to Sophia, Una, and Rose at the Wayside, and he notified Fields in Boston. Fields in turn contacted Gurney in Cambridge to inform Julian. Frank Stearns had just returned from his first recitation on the morning of the twentieth when Julian “appeared at my room in the Massachusetts dormitory, and said, like a man gasping for breath,‘My father is dead, and I want you to come with me.’” They hurried to Fields’s Beacon Hill house, where Annie Fields shared what she knew.Afterward they“wandered about Boston, silent and aimless.”2 That afternoon Julian met Pierce’s train with Nathaniel’s body aboard, learned the details of his death, then accompanied Pierce, Fields, and the body to Concord. He found his mother and sisters “wonderfully sustained and composed,” although Sophia reported that Julian seemed “very sad.” He had lost his “wise counselor and friend,” but her son “tried to comfort me.” Aunt Ebe took pity on him, writing Una, “Poor Julian, just entering the world, how much he will miss his father’s care. You and Rose will be with your mother, and safe from evil; but a young man’s life is full of peril.”3 Still a month shy of his eighteenth birthday, Julian was his father’s only male heir and thus titular head of the family. He wrote Fields with news of the arrangements. “As I supposed mamma is willing that the service should take place in the church”—the local Unitarian chapel, where Thoreau’s funeral had been held 42 part i: the heir two years earlier.At Sophia’s behest, the officiating minister was James Freeman Clarke, who had married her and Nathaniel in 1842. Julian cautioned Fields not to tell his mother “nor anyone else, if you can help it,” that his father’s body“has been embalmed, for she cannot bear the idea of his being touched in any way.”4 Emerson, Fields, Longfellow, and Bronson Alcott were among the pallbearers, and Whittier, Lowell, Pierce, Louis Agassiz, Ellery Channing, and Abby and Louisa May Alcott were among the attendees at the funeral and burial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery on May 23. Julian held his mother’s hand during the funeral, and his “was ice,” Sophia recalled. “He feared it would be too much for me.”5 His plans changed overnight. He did not enlist in the army.“I had become the Head of the Family,” he concluded, “and mustn’t leave them unprotected .” He literally assumed his father’s mantle: Sophia altered Nathaniel’s blue cloak “into an up-to-date Prince Albert coat; for ten years after it was my best garment.” He decided to “give up Harvard and stay at home and take care of things.” He moved into his father’s study in the tower of the Wayside for the summer. His mother believed Nathaniel’s death “made a man of him, for he feels all the care of me and of his sisters.”“The children have taught me rather better than I can teach them,” she wrote her sister Lizzie, “because they are pure mediums of truth and goodness.” Perhaps not.That summer Julian sometimes tomcatted around the neighborhood at night and ignored the stairs when he returned, climbing the outside of the house and entering his room “burglariously through a window.”6 So much for the “Head of the Family.” In early August, Pierce drove to the Wayside behind a pair of black Hambletonian horses and fetched Julian to New Hampshire and Vermont for a fortnight respite of even more idle pleasure. Upon their arrival at Great Boar’s Head near Rye Beach, Julian remembered,“Pierce and I took a swim to rid ourselves of the dust of travel. Bathing suits were unknown in that remoteness. ‘You’re well set up for a lad of seventeen,’ Pierce remarked...