Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

[Childhood with Thoreau, as Remembered in 1882]

[42] UT [Childhood with Thoreau, as Remembered in 1882] [Edith Emerson Forbes] Edith Emerson Forbes (1841–1929) was the younger of Waldo and Lidian Emerson ’s two daughters. She married William Hathaway Forbes in 1865. Despite a breach in her family’s friendship with Franklin Benjamin Sanborn after she rejected his marriage proposal in 1861, Forbes responded to his request for her memories of Thoreau by sending this reminiscence, which Sanborn included in his 1882 biography, Henry D. Thoreau. Like her brother, Edward, and sister, Ellen, Edith Forbes fondly recalls Thoreau’s paternal steadiness in her life, particularly the warmth of domestic scenes that took place during Thoreau’s lengthy stays with her family in the 1840s as well as his regular evening visits. Her mother’s correspondence amplifies these memories: “Edith is looking most beautifully as she dances with Henry [Thoreau] or lays her innocent head on his music box that she may drink yet deeper of its sweetness. . . . [T]he cherub face appears above the screen for Uncle Henry takes care that Edie shall take as high flights in Papa’s absence as ever—she rides on his shoulder or is held high up in the air—I think he adds to her happiness, and she no less to his” (Lidian Jackson Emerson, Selected Letters, 121–22). Pointedly, all three Emerson children specifically cherish Thoreau as huckleberry party orchestrator par excellence, countering their father’s trivializing of this role in his eulogy of Thoreau. “the time when Mr. Thoreau was our more intimate playfellow must have been in the years from 1850 to 1855. He used to come in, at dusk, as my brother and I sat on the rug before the dining-room fire, and, taking the great green rocking-chair, he would tell us stories. Those I remember were his own adventures, as a child. He began with telling us of the different houses he had lived in, and what he could remember about each. The house where he was born was on the Virginia road, near the old Bedford road. The only thing he remembered about that house was that from its [43] windows he saw a flock of geese walking along in a row on the other side of the road; but to show what a long memory he had, when he told his mother of this, she said the only time he could have seen that sight was, when he was about eight months old, for they left that house then. Soon after, he lived in the old house on the Lexington road, nearly opposite Mr. Emerson ’s. There he was tossed by a cow as he played near the door, in his red flannel dress,—and so on, with a story for every house. He used to delight us with the adventures of a brood of fall chickens, which slept at night in a tall old fashioned fig-drum in the kitchen, and as their bed was not changed when they grew larger, they packed themselves every night each in its own place, and grew up, not shapely, but shaped to each other and the drum, like figs! “Sometimes he would play juggler tricks for us, and swallow his knife and produce it again from our ears or noses. We usually ran to bring some apples for him as soon as he came in, and often he would cut one in halves in fine points that scarcely showed on close examination, and then the joke was to ask Father to break it for us and see it fall to pieces in his hands. But perhaps the evenings most charming were those when he brought some ears of pop-corn in his pocket and headed an expedition to the garret to hunt out the old brass warming-pan; in which he would put the corn, and hold it out and shake it over the fire till it was heated through, and at last, as we listened, the rattling changed to popping. When this became very brisk, he would hold the pan over the rug and lift the lid, and a beautiful fountain of the white corn flew all over us. It required both strength and patience to hold out the heavy warming-pan at arm’s length so long, and no one else ever gave us that pleasure. “I remember his singing ‘Tom Bowline’ to us, and also playing on his flute, but that was earlier. In the summer he used...