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

From “Thoreau” (1866)

[68] UT From “Thoreau” (1866) [Moncure Daniel Conway] Virginia native Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907) was a Harvard-educated Unitarian minister, an abolitionist, and an author who came to admire Thoreau after spending several months in Concord while on summer break from college in 1853. In 1858, Conway married Ellen Dana, whom he met when serving as pastor of a Unitarian church in Cincinnati. His abolitionist and increasingly radical theological views led him to break with the American Unitarian church in the early 1860s; in 1864 the Conways moved to London, where Conway spent the second half of his life as minister at the Free Thought South Place Chapel. As did other second-generation Transcendentalists, Conway published reminiscences about the Concord writers, but he also authored full-length biographies of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Carlyle, in addition to several antislavery novels. In Pine and Palm (1887), Henry Thoreau appears as an abolitionist who dispels an angry mob’s attack by quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. Appearing first in the London-based Fraser’s, Conway’s article is one of the earliest reminiscences to strike a more objective rather than adulatory tone; Conway also offers helpful contextual background about the Transcendentalist era. His narration here of Thoreau and his family’s aid in July 1853 to an unidenti fied male slave who had escaped from Virginia is also recounted in his two-volume Autobiography Memories and Experiences (1904). With lengthy excerpts from Thoreau’s poetry, Letters to Various Persons, A Week, and Walden, this article also put before a largely unfamiliar British audience the details of Thoreau’s life along with the scope of his writings. “Thoreau” was excerpted in several nineteenth-century British and American periodicals, including a condensed version in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on 23 June 1866. it is now nearly four years since the inhabitants of the little town of Concord , Massachusetts, were gathered round the grave of one who, though a hermit, was dear to all of them, and who, as a naturalist and scholar, had received the homage of those literary men who have given to that town the celebrity of an American Weimar. . . . [69] I have met with but few in England who have seen any one of Thoreau’s books, and have seen no public notice of any of them except in the Saturday Review, which contained one or two articles concerning some of them last year, in one of which their author was designated, not quite happily I think, as “an American Rousseau.” The reasons for this absence of any general recognition of so rare a mind lay doubtless rather in the peculiarities of the man himself than in the blindness of the world. As there are essences of such delicate flavour that they can be preserved only by being kept covered, there are characters whose fine aromas are destroyed by exposure to the popularis aura—spirits that must sit at silent, solitary tasks, leaving the world to enter and admire when they have passed away. Thoreau was eminently one of these; and his writings were so physiognomical, so blended with his personality, that they seemed to show their author’s aversion to publicity. He once told me with evident satisfaction that his first, and at that time his only book—which was printed, I think, about twenty years ago—was still on its publisher’s shelf, with the exception of copies given by him to his friends. Like the pious Yógì of the East, so long motionless , whilst gazing on the sun, that knotty plants encircled his neck, and the cast snake-skin his loins, and the birds built their nests upon his shoulders, this seer and naturalist seemed by an equal consecration to have become a part of the field and forest amid which he dwelt; and he with his works, to read which is like walking through morning meadows, or amid the mystic wolds of nightingales, might naturally be undiscerned in the landscape by the great world thundering past in its train, even in an interval when the newspaper or the railway romance might be laid aside. . . . He could make a boat, or a fence, or plant a garden, and when he needed money obtained it by doing some such piece of work. It is plain, however, that he had no “talent for wealth,” and it was an early perception with him that a man’s real life was generally sacrificed to obtaining the means...