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

[Journal and Epistolary Comments on Thoreau, 1842–1854]

[27] UT [Journal and Epistolary Comments on Thoreau, 1842–1854] Nathaniel Hawthorne Along with Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) completes the triad of Concord authors most famous today. He lived in Concord three times during his adult life, first renting the historic Old Manse with his bride, Sophia Peabody, shortly after their wedding in the summer of 1842. As a wedding gift to the couple, Henry Thoreau assisted local African American handyman and gardener Jack Garrison in planting the large garden on the Manse’s expansive front lawn. Both Hawthorne’s letters and journal commentary reflect generally ambivalent opinions of Thoreau, whose behavior and manners he found distasteful but whose writings he recommended, albeit unevenly. Hawthorne most admired Thoreau’s firm individualism, which he credited with preventing Thoreau from coming too strongly under the Transcendentalists’ spell. Excluding his enjoyment of a few canoe outings with Thoreau, Hawthorne differed from Emerson and others who found Thoreau most likable as nature guide. Describing a walk to Gowing’s Swamp with Hawthorne and Thoreau, William Ellery Channing relates Hawthorne’s unexpectedly disappointing behavior : “It was a choice walk, to which Thoreau and I did not invite everybody. When we reached the place Hawthorne said nothing, but just glanced about him and remarked: ‘Let us get out of this dreadful hole!’” (qtd. in Sanborn, Recollections, 2:526). When he and Sophia lived in Salem, Massachusetts, in the mid-1840s, Hawthorne arranged for Thoreau to give two lectures there. But when Walden was published he found as much to damn as to praise, writing to British editor Richard M. Milnes that “‘Walden’ and ‘Concord River,’ are by a very remarkable man; but I hardly hope you will read his books, unless for the observation of nature contained in them—which is wonderfully accurate. I sometimes fancy it a characteristic of American books, that it generally requires an effort to read them; there is hardly ever one that carries the reader away with it; and few that a man of weak resolution can get to the end of” (Letters, 3:277). In what seems one of his most sincere reflections, thoreau in his own time [28] Hawthorne expressed disappointment when Thoreau departed Concord for New York in 1843: “I should like to have him remain here; he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree; and with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation in him too” (American Notebooks, 369). In the selections below, journal entries are preceded by a date. Excerpts from letters are preceded by the name of the correspondent and the date. 1 September [1842] Mr. Thorow dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character—a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior . But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty. He was educated, I believe, at Cambridge, and formerly kept school in this town; but for two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood. He has been for sometime an inmate of Mr. Emerson’s family; and, in requital, he labors in the garden, and performs such other offices as may suit him—being entertained by Mr. Emerson for the sake of what true manhood there is in him. Mr. Thorow is a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer , which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has strange stories to tell of adventures, and friendly passages with these lower brethren of mortality . Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they grow, whether in garden or wild wood, are his familiar friends. He is also on intimate terms with the...