F. B. Sanborn

"Margaret Fuller," says William Henry Channing, "was indeed The Friend; this was her vocation." It was no less the vocation of Thoreau, though in a more lofty, unvarying, and serene manner.

"Literally," says the friend who best knew him, "his views of friendship were high and noble. Those who loved him never had the least reason to regret it. He made no useless professions, never asked one of those questions that destroy all relation; but he was on the spot at the time, and had so much of human life in his keeping to the last, that he could spare a breathing-place for a friend. He meant friendship, and meant nothing else, and stood by it without the slightest abatement; not veering as a weathercock with each shift of a friend's fortune, nor like those who bury their early friendships, in order to make room for fresh corpses."

It is, therefore, impossible to sketch him by himself. He could have said, with Ellery Channing,—

"O band of Friends, ye breathe within this space,
And the rough finish of a humble man
By your kind touches rises into art."

His earliest companion was his brother John, "a flowing generous spirit," as one described him, for whom his younger brother never ceased to grieve. Walking among the Cohasset rocks and looking at the scores of shipwrecked men from the Irish brig St. John, in 1849, he said, "A man can attend but one funeral in his life, can behold but one corpse." With him it was the funeral of John Thoreau in February, 1842. They had made the voyage of the Concord and Merrimac together, in 1839; they had walked and labored together, and invented Indian names for one another from boyhood. John was "Sachem Hopeful of Hopewell,"—a sunny soul, always serene and loving. When publishing his first book, in 1849, Henry dedicated it to this brother, with the simple verse—

"Where'er thou sail'st who sailed with me,
Though now thou climbest loftier mounts,
And fairer rivers dost ascend,
Be thou my Muse, my Brother John."

John Thoreau's death was singular and painful; his brother could not speak of it without physical suffering, so that when he related it to his friend Ricketson at New Bedford, he turned pale and was forced to go to the door for air. This was the only time Mr. Ricketson ever saw him show deep emotion. His sister Sophia once said:—

"Henry rarely spoke of dear John; it pained him too much. He sent the following verses from Staten Island in May, 1843, the year after John's death, in a letter to Helen. You will see that they apply to himself:"—

"Brother, where dost thou dwell?
What sun shines for thee now?
Dost thou, indeed, fare well,
As we wished here below?

"What season didst thou find?
'T was winter here.
Are not the Fates more kind
Than they appear?

"Is thy brow clear again,
As in thy youthful years?
And was that ugly pain
The summit of thy fears?

"Yet thou wast cheery still;
They could not quench thy fire;
Thou didst abide their will,
And then retire.

"Where chiefly shall I look
To feel thy presence near?
Along the neighboring brook
May I thy voice still hear?

"Dost thou still haunt the brink
Of yonder river's tide?
And may I ever think
That thou art by my side?

"What bird wilt thou employ
To bring me word of thee?
For it would give them joy,—
'T would give them liberty,
To serve their former lord
With wing and minstrelsy.

"A sadder strain mixed with their song,
They've slowlier built their nests;
Since thou art gone
Their lively labor rests.

"Where is the finch, the thrush
I used to hear?
Ah, they could well abide
The dying year.

"Now they no more return,
I hear them not;
They have remained to mourn;
Or else forgot."

Before the death of his brother, Thoreau had formed the friendship with Ellery Channing, that was in some degree to replace the daily intimacy he had enjoyed with John Thoreau. This man of genius, and of the moods that sometimes make genius an unhappy boon, was a year younger than Thoreau when he came, in 1843, to dwell in Concord with his bride, a younger sister of Margaret Fuller. They lived first in a cottage near Mr. Emerson's, Thoreau being at that time an inmate of Mr. Emerson's household; afterwards, in 1843, Mr. Channing removed to a hill-top some miles away, then to New York in 1844-45, then to Europe for a few months, and finally to a house on the main street of the village, opposite the last residence of the Thoreau family, where Henry lived from 1850 till his death in 1862. In the garden of Mr. Channing's house, which lay on the river, Thoreau kept his boat, under a group of willows, and from that friendly harbor all his later voyages were made. At times they talked of occupying this house together.

"I have an old house and a garden patch," said Channing, "you have legs and arms, and we both need each other's companionship. These miserable cracks and crannies which have made the wall of life look thin and fungus-like, will be cemented by the sweet and solid mortar of friendship."

They did in fact associate more closely than if they had lived in the same house.

At the age of thirty-seven, when contemplating a removal from the neighborhood of his friend Thoreau, this humorous man of letters thus described himself and his tastes to another friend:—

"I am a poet, or of a poetical temper or mood, with a very limited income both of brains and of moneys. This world is rather a sour world. But as I am, equally with you, an admirer of Cowper, why should I not prove a sort of unnecessary addition to your neighborhood possibly? I may leave Concord, and my aim would be to get a small place, in the vicinity of a large town, with some land, and, if possible, near to some one person with whom I might in some measure fraternize. Come, my neighbor! thou hast now a new occupation, the setting up of a poet and literary man,—one who loves old books, old garrets, old wines, old pipes, and (last not least) Cowper. We might pass the winter in comparing variorum editions of our favorite authors, and the summer in walking and horticulture. This is a grand scheme of life. All it requires is the house of which I spake. I think one in middle life feels averse to change, and especially to local change. The Lares and Penates love to establish themselves, and desire no moving. But the fatal hour may come, when, bidding one long, one last adieu to those weather-beaten Penates, we sally forth with Don Quixote, once more to strike our lances into some new truth, or life, or man."

This hour did come, and the removal was made for a few months or years, during which the two friends met at odd intervals, and in queer companionship. But the "sweet and solid mortar of friendship" was never broken, though the wall of life came to look like a ruin. When, in Thoreau's last illness, Channing, in deep grief, said "that a change had come over the dream of life, and that solitude began to peer out curiously from the dells and wood-roads," Thoreau whispered, "with his foot on the step of the other world," says Channing, "It is better some things should end." Of their earlier friendship, and of Channing's poetic gift, so admirable, yet so little appreciated by his contemporaries, this mention occurs in a letter written by Thoreau in March, 1856:—

"I was surprised to hear the other day that Channing was in X. When he was here last (in December, I think), he said, like himself, in answer to my inquiry where he lived, 'that he did not know the name of the place;' so it has remained in a degree of obscurity to me. I am rejoiced to hear that you are getting on so bravely with him and his verses. He and I, as you know, have been old cronies,—

"'Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill,
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heared,' etc.

"'But O, the heavy change,' now he is gone. The Channing you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together! You will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left for you to solve it. I suspect that the most that you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,—to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read his poems. That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,—take hold of that. Review them if you can,—perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing. He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. He will ever be 'reserved and enigmatic,' and you must deal with him at arm's length. I have no secrets to tell you concerning him, and do not wish to call obvious excellences and defects by far-fetched names. Nor need I suggest how witty and poetic he is,—and what an inexhaustible fund of good-fellowship you will find in him."

In the record of his winter visitors at Walden, Thoreau had earlier made mention of Channing, who then lived on Ponkawtasset Hill, two or three miles away from the hermitage.

"He who came from farthest to my lodge," says Thoreau, "through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours; even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth, and resound with the murmur of much sober talk,—making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest."

In his "Week," as Thoreau floats down the Concord, past the Old Manse, he commemorates first Hawthorne and then Channing, saying of the latter,—

"On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay,
Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,
A poet wise hath settled whose fine ray
Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day.
Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by,
Most travelers cannot at first descry,
But eyes that wont to range the evening sky."

These were true and deserved compliments, but they availed little (no more than did the praises of Emerson in the "Dial," and of Hawthorne in his "Mosses") to make Channing known to the general reader. Some years after Thoreau's death, when writing to another friend, this neglected poet said:—

"Is there no way of disabusing S. of the liking he has for the verses I used to write? You probably know he is my only patron, but that is no reason he should be led astray. There is no other test of the value of poetry, but its popularity. My verses have never secured a single reader but S. He really believes, I think, in those so-called verses; but they are not good,—they are wholly unknown and unread, and always will be. Mediocre poetry is worse than nothing,—and mine is not even mediocre. I have presented S. with the last set of those little books there is, to have them bound, if he will. He can keep them as a literary curio, and in his old age amuse himself with thinking, 'How could ever I have liked these?'"

Yet this self-disparaging poet was he who wrote,—

and who cried to his companions,—

It is he, also, who has best told, in prose and verse, what Thoreau was in his character and his literary art. In dedicating to his friend Henry, the poem called "Near Home," published in 1858, Channing thus addressed him:—

In these majestic lines, suggestive of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of Milton, yet fitting, by the force of imagination, to the simplicity and magnanimity that Thoreau had displayed, one reads the secret of that character which made the Concord recluse first declare to the world the true mission of John Brown, whose friend he had been for a few years. Of Alcott and of Hawthorne, of Margaret Fuller and Horace Greeley, he had been longer the friend; and in the year before he met Brown he had stood face to face with Walt Whitman in Brooklyn. Mr. Alcott's testimony to Thoreau's worth and friendliness has been constant.

Not less emphatic was Thoreau's praise of Mr. Alcott, after these long winter evenings with him in the hut:—

Nor did Thoreau participate in such discourse at Walden alone, but frequented Mr. Alcott's conversations at Mr. Emerson's house in Concord, at Hawthorne's in Salem, at Marston Watson's in Plymouth, at Daniel Ricketson's in New Bedford, and once or twice in Boston and New York. With Mr. Alcott and Alice Carey, Thoreau visited Horace Greeley at Chappaqua, in 1856, and with Mr. Alcott alone he called on Walt Whitman in Brooklyn the same year.

Between Hawthorne and Thoreau, Ellery Channing was perhaps the interpreter, for they had not very much in common, though friendly and mutually respectful. The boat in which Thoreau made his voyage of 1839, on the Concord and Merrimac, came afterwards into Hawthorne's possession, and was the frequent vehicle for Channing and Hawthorne as they made those excursions which Hawthorne has commemorated. Channing also has commemorated those years when Hawthorne spent the happiest hours of his life in the Old Manse, to which he had removed soon after his marriage in 1842:—

In July, 1860, writing to his sister Sophia, among the New Hampshire mountains, Thoreau said:—

This was upon the return of Hawthorne from his long residence abroad, in England, Portugal, and Italy. Thoreau died two years before Hawthorne, and they are buried within a few feet of each other in the Concord cemetery, their funerals having proceeded from the same parish church near by.

Of Thoreau's relations with Emerson, this is not the place to speak in full; it was, however, the most important, if not the most intimate, of all his friendships, and that out of which the others mainly grew. Their close acquaintance began in 1837. In the latter part of April, 1841, Thoreau became an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, and remained there till, in the spring of 1843, he went for a few months to be the tutor of Mr. William Emerson's sons at Staten Island. In 1840, while teaching school in Concord, Thoreau seems to have been fully admitted into that circle of which Emerson, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller were the leaders. In May, 1840, this circle met, as it then did frequently, at the house of Mr. Emerson, to converse on "the inspiration of the Prophet and Bard, the nature of Poetry, and the causes of the sterility of Poetic Inspiration in our age and country." Mr. Alcott, in his diary, has preserved a record of this meeting, and some others of the same kind. It seems that on this occasion—Thoreau being not quite twenty-three years old, Mr. Alcott forty-one, Mr. Emerson thirty-seven, and Miss Fuller thirty—all these were present, and also Jones Very, the Salem poet, Dr. F. H. Hedge, Dr. C. A. Bartol, Dr. Caleb Stetson, and Robert Bartlett of Plymouth. Bartlett and Very were graduates of Harvard a year before Thoreau, and afterwards tutors there; indeed, all the company except Alcott were Cambridge scholars,—for Margaret Fuller, without entering college, had breathed in the learned air of Cambridge, and gone beyond the students who were her companions. I find no earlier record of Thoreau's participation in these meetings; but afterward he was often present. In May, 1839, Mr. Alcott had held one of his conversations at the house of Thoreau's mother, but no mention is made of Henry taking part in it. At a conversation in Concord in 1846, one April evening, Thoreau came in from his Walden hermitage, and protested with some vehemence against Mr. Alcott's declaration that Jesus "stood in a more tender and intimate nearness to the heart of mankind than any character in life or literature." Thoreau thought he "asserted this claim for the fair Hebrew in exaggeration"; yet he could say in the "Week," "It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ."

This earliest of his volumes, like most of his writings, is a record of his friendships, and in it we find that high-toned, paradoxical essay on Love and Friendship, which has already been quoted. To read this literally, as Channing says, "would be to accuse him of stupidity; he gossips there of a high, imaginary world." But its tone is no higher than was the habitual feeling of Thoreau towards his friends, or that sentiment which he inspired in them. In Mr. Alcott's diary for March 16, 1847, he writes, two years before the "Week" was made public:—

This high anticipation of the young author's career was fully shared by Emerson himself, who everywhere praised the genius of Thoreau; and when in England in 1848, listened readily to a proposition from Dr. Chapman the publisher, for a new magazine to be called "The Atlantic," and printed at the same time in London and in Boston, whose chief contributors in England should be Froude, Garth Wilkinson, Arthur Hugh Clough, and perhaps Carlyle; and in New England, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, the Channings, Theodore Parker, and Elliott Cabot. The plan came to nothing, but it may have been some reminiscence of it which, nine years afterward, gave its name to that Boston magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly." Mr. Emerson's letter was dated in London, April 20, 1848, and said:—

In 1846, before Mr. Emerson went abroad, we find Thoreau (whose own hut beside Walden had been built and inhabited for a year) sketching a design for a lodge which Mr. Emerson then proposed to build on the opposite shore. It was to be a retreat for study and writing, at the summit of a ledge, with a commanding prospect over the level country, towards Monadnoc and Wachusett in the west and northwest. For this lookout Mr. Alcott added a story to Thoreau's sketch; but the hermitage was never built, and the plan finally resulted in a rustic summer-house, erected by Alcott with some aid from Thoreau, in Mr. Emerson's garden, in 1847-48.[9]

Humbler friends than poets and philosophers sometimes shared the companionship of these brethren in Concord. In February, 1847, Mr. Alcott, who was then a woodman, laboring on his hillside with his own axe, where afterwards Hawthorne wandered and mused, thus notes in his diary an incident not unusual in the town:—

It was this slave, no doubt, who had lodged for a while in Thoreau's Walden hut.

My own acquaintance with Thoreau did not begin with our common hostility to slavery, which afterwards brought us most closely together, but sprang from the accident of my editing for a few weeks the "Harvard Magazine," a college monthly, in 1854-55, in which appeared a long review of "Walden" and the "Week." In acknowledgment of this review, which was laudatory and made many quotations from his two volumes, Thoreau, whom I had never seen, called at my room in Holworthy Hall, Cambridge, in January, 1855, and left there in my absence, a copy of the "Week" with a message implying it was for the writer of the magazine article. It so happened that I was in the College Library when Thoreau was calling on me, and when he came, directly after, to the Library, some one present pointed him out to me as the author of "Walden." I was then a senior in college, and soon to go on my winter vacation; in course of which I wrote to Thoreau from my native town, as follows:—

This note, which I had entirely forgotten, and of which I trust my friend soon forgave the pertness, came to me recently among his papers; with one exception, it is the only letter that passed between us, I think, in an acquaintance of more than seven years. Some six weeks after its date, I went to live in Concord, and happened to take rooms in Mr. Channing's house, just across the way from Thoreau's. I met him more than once in March, 1855, but he did not call on my sister and me until the 11th of April, when I made the following brief note of his appearance:—

A month or two later my diary expanded this sketch a little, with other particulars:—

Notwithstanding the slow admiration that these trivial comments indicated, our friendship grew apace, and for two years or more I dined with him almost daily, and often joined in his walks and river voyages, or swam with him in some of our numerous Concord waters. In 1857 I introduced John Brown to him, then a guest at my house; and in 1859, the evening before Brown's last birthday, we listened together to the old captain's last speech in the Concord Town Hall. The events of that year and the next brought us closely together, and I found him the stanchest of friends.

This chapter might easily be extended into a volume, so long was the list of his companions, and so intimate and perfect his relation with them, at least on his own side.