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

[Conversations on Concord] (1892 and 1893)

[141] UT [Conversations on Concord] (1892 and 1893) Edward Sherman Hoar Edward Sherman Hoar (1823–1893) was the brother of George, Rockwood, and Elizabeth Hoar. He accompanied Thoreau on an excursion to the Maine woods in July–August 1857, and to the White Mountains of New Hampshire in July 1858. Without a doubt, however, his most infamous connection to Thoreau occurred on 30 April 1844—when as a result of carelessly cooking fish the two men accidentally started a fire in Concord in the woods overlooking Fairhaven Bay. The fire destroyed over eight hundred acres largely owned by the Hubbard and Wheeler families. The fact that Edward Hoar’s father, Samuel Hoar, was a wealthy and prominent citizen whose financial position, fortunately, meant that he could settle with these families saved Thoreau from the severe humiliation and financial stress of such a disaster. Like his friend Edward Emerson, Edward Hoar responded profoundly to Thoreau: “With Thoreau’s life something went out of Concord woods and fields and river that will never return. He so loved Nature , delighted in her every aspect and seemed to infuse himself into her” (qtd. in Edward Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend, 118). To those who accused Thoreau of being antisocial, Hoar explained his bearing as “a sort of inherited petulance, that covered a sensitive and affectionate nature easily wounded by the scornful criticism” (qtd. in Harding, “Edward Hoar,” 7). In conversations recorded in the early 1890s with educator and naturalist Edmund Sandford Burgess (1855–1928), Hoar reflects on his friendship with Thoreau and others in Concord as well as the wider Transcendentalist circle. To Edward S. Burgess, 30 December [18]92 I have just finished reading Thoreau’s Winter. There is not so much natural history in it as in some other volumes, not so much as there is of matter addressed to man’s moral nature. I have greatly regretted that I did not know Thoreau better. . . . I was shown that side of his nature to the full, the natural history side, the minute observer. But there were other sides to him, and I was wholly unaware then of the moral side that appears so strongly in his books. He thoreau in his own time [142] did not show that in our walks. Thoreau was intensely a moralist, to him everything was valuable according as it appealed to the moral sentiment and he would lose no opportunity to enforce a moral sentiment. Nor would he lose any opportunity for observing nature even if it was to get up in dark night and watch for hours the lightening around a rotten log in Maine. He was ready to open that side of himself to any one who would pay the price. But that meant, to go with him in his walk; to walk long and far; to have wet feet, and go so for hours; to pull a boat all day; to come home late at night after many miles. If you would do that with him he would take you with him. If you flunked at anything he had no more use for you. Thoreau was of a very fine-grained family. He knew he had not long to live and he determined to make the most of it. How to observe and acquire knowledge and secure the true objects of life without much expenditure of money was his great study. He would not wait as most men, to acquire a competence, before settling down to realize the ends of life. He would show how they could be secured without money; or with very little. This was the secret of his Walden Pond. . . . I could have become a good ornithologist. When I was young I was a good shot, could hit a bird on the wing at 200 yards. But when I became acquainted with Henry Thoreau he persuaded me out of it. He would never shoot a bird; and I think his method greatly preferable to that of Mr John Burroughs. Thoreau would lie and watch the movements of a bird for hours, and so get the knowledge he wanted. He used to say that if you shot the bird you got only a dead bird anyway; you could make out a few parts in anatomy or plumage, just such as Dr. Coue’s work is; but you couldn’t see how the bird lives and acts. Since then I have never shot a bird. . . . To Edward Sandford...