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

From “Glimpses of Force: Thoreau and Alcott” (1891)

[145] UT From “Glimpses of Force: Thoreau and Alcott” (1891) Rose Hawthorne Lathrop Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851–1926) was the youngest of Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s three children. She spent the first decade of her life in England and Europe, during her father’s term as Consul to Liverpool and as the family subsequently traveled abroad. In 1871, Rose Hawthorne married George Parsons Lathrop; both converted to Catholicism in 1891. After the two separated in 1895, Rose Lathrop devoted her life to serving the ill and indigent, founding St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer and Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York. In 1898, she became a nun and took the name Mother Mary Alphonsa; she later founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne. Lathrop wrote stories and a book of poetry, Along the Shore, in 1888, in addition to a reminiscence of her father, Memories of Hawthorne, published in 1897. This sketch imparts her childhood and adolescent memories of Thoreau, whom she knew in the last two years of his life after her family had returned to Concord in 1860. i was about 9 years old and coming sternly to realize that I had been transferred from English homelikeness to American sandbanks, when, a little above the garden path, I beheld two enormous eyes not far from each other. They moved toward me. I melted away. Thoreau had come to call at the house. The horrible effect of the great eyes, grey as autumn pools lit by a rift in the clouds, upon a mind pining for luxurious verdure and gem-like blue heavens, created a thirst in me for the dreadful. I hung about the garden (it was a grim failure of a garden) until the strange being, native to harsh America, should again emerge for departure. Stationed in a more retired spot I watched for him, and by and by he came. I noticed with transfixed pulses that he strode, clothed in exaggerated dignity, with long steps, plac- thoreau in his own time [146] ing one foot exactly before the other according to the Indian fashion, which in Thoreau’s case was a downright marvel, since his feet seemed interminable . I next became conscious of a vaguely large nose that finally curved to his chin, and then I realized that this being was looking at me—the huge eyes at a slight oblique angle; and he passed so close to me, in consequence of a roguish turn of the path, that I found his grey-brown irises were bordered by heavy dark lines, like a wild animals. For years this vision really distressed me in remembrance, and appeared to have a harmonious connection with my bitter lot in being an exile from British daisies and robins. And yet the time came when both Thoreau and America were revealed to me! The first thing which Thoreau did to soften my heart toward him was to fall desperately ill. My mother sent him our sweet old musicbox, which softly dreamed forth its tunes, and he enjoyed its gentle strains as he lay perishing. I had heard a great deal of his poetic nature and instructive genius , and when he died it seemed as if an anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood, and dropped, fading , in its depths. I never crossed a hill or a field in Concord, or gathered a cardinal-flower or any other rare bloom, without thinking of Thoreau as a companion of delicacy, though also a brother of the Indian. However, I never quite forgave him the steady stare of those unhuman eyes when I was a disheartened child. And I think I was right, for I do not doubt that his peculiar step, the stride adopted, was a sign of affectation; and that his intense gaze was the result of an abnormal self-consciousness. As a child the superficial faults which I noticed stood for the man himself; but to-day I judge that of all affectations that ever were, perhaps his of a new outward bearing and manner of thought, to distinguish him severely from futile mortals, was the least culpable. He had so much provocation on his side! He longed to herald the fact that he was not one of the triflers, even at the risk of resembling a savage. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever I walked in them; and the lovely pond looked always so beautiful as...