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[A Day with Thoreau and Emerson in 1852]
- University of Iowa Press
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[36] UT [A Day with Thoreau and Emerson in 1852] John Albee In May 1852, poet and literary critic John Albee (1833–1915) paid a visit to Waldo Emerson, which he later described in his Remembrances of Emerson, published in 1901. Thoreau figures prominently in this account, as a quasimember of the family, in the domestic scenes with the Emerson children as well as in the adults’ discussion. Albee presents a spontaneous view of Thoreau , including an example of his recurring ridicule of the uselessness of a Harvard education. Albee’s depiction of both Emerson’s deference to and occasional teasing of Thoreau also evidences the tenor of this relationship by the early 1850s. thoreau was already there. I think he had ended his experiment at Walden Pond some years before. Thoreau was dressed, I remember, in a plain, neat suit of dark clothes, not quite black. He had a healthy, out-of-door appearance , and looked like a respectable husbandman. He was rather silent; when he spoke, it was in either a critical or a witty vein. I did not know who or what he was; and I find in my old diary of the day that I spelled his rare name phonetically, and heard afterward that he was a man who had been a hermit. I observed that he was much at home with Emerson; and as he remained through the afternoon and evening, and I left him still at the fireside , he appeared to me to belong in some way to the household. I observed also that Emerson continually deferred to him and seemed to anticipate his view, preparing himself obviously for a quiet laugh at Thoreau’s negative and biting criticisms, especially in regard to education and educational institutions . He was clearly fond of Thoreau; but whether in a human way, or as an amusement, I could not then make out. Dear, indeed, as I have since learned, was Thoreau to that household; where his memory is kept green, where Emerson’s children still speak of him as their elder brother. In the evening Thoreau devoted himself wholly to the children and the parching of corn by the open fire. I think he made himself very entertaining to them. Emerson was talking to me, and I was only conscious of Thoreau’s [37] presence as we are of those about us but not engaged with us. A very pretty picture remains in my memory of Thoreau leaning over the fire with a fair girl on either side, which somehow did not comport with the subsequent story I heard of his being a hermit. Parched corn had for him a fascination beyond the prospect of something to eat. He says in one of his books that some dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates. . . . I never saw Thoreau again until I heard him in Boston Music Hall deliver his impassioned eulogy on John Brown. Meantime the “Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers” had become one of my favorite books; and I have atoned for my youthful and untimely want of recognition by bringing from my ocean beach a smooth pebble to his cairn at Walden. . . . In the conversation of an afternoon and evening it is impossible to relate all that was said; one thinks he never shall forget a word of such a memorable day; but at length it becomes overlaid in the chambers of the memory and only reappears when uncalled for. I find set down in my diary of the day two or three things which a thousand observers have remarked: that Emerson spoke in a mild, peculiar manner, justifying the text of Thoreau, that you must be calm before you can utter oracles; that he often hesitated for a word, but it was the right one he waited for; that he sometimes expressed himself mystically, and like a book. This meant, I suppose, that the style and subjects were novel to me, being then only used to the slang of schoolboys and the magisterial manner of pedagogues. He seldom looked the person addressed in the eye, and rarely put direct questions. I fancy this was a part of his extreme delicacy of manner. As soon as I could I introduced the problem I came to propound—what course a young man must take to get the best kind of education. Emerson pleaded always for the college; said he himself entered at fourteen. This aroused the wrath of Thoreau, who would...