affected by the novelist James's constancy
of composition. They relate, with wide eyes, that he has a huge
manuscript book, in which he incessantly records the ends of thoughts,
bits of observation and experience, and facts of all kinds--a kind of
intellectual and scientific ragbag, into which all shreds and remnants of
conversations and reminiscences of wayside reveries are incontinently
thrust. This work goes on, they aver, day and night, and when he
travels the rag-bag travels too, and grows more plethoric with each mile
of the journey. And a story, which will one day be a tradition, is
perpetuated in the village, that one night, before his wife had become
completely accustomed to his habits, she awoke suddenly, and hearing
him groping about the room, inquired anxiously,
"My dear, are you unwell?"
"No, my love, only an idea."
The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a poet.
The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk in
learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid
philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's stone,
and sing of the springs of poetry.
The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground
to suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot;
nor has Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of
the woods and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian
arrowhead upon the premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure
towards the facts of nature as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If every
quiet country town in New England had a son who, with a lore like
Selborne's and an eye like Buffon's, had watched and studied its
landscape and history, and then published the result, as Thoreau has
done, in a book as redolent of genuine and perceptive sympathy with
nature as a clover-field of honey, New England would seem as poetic
and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives in the berry pastures upon a
bank over Walden Pond, and in a little house of his own building. One
pleasant summer afternoon a small party of us helped him raise it--a bit
of life as Arcadian as any at Brook Farm. Elsewhere in the village he
turns up arrowheads abundantly, and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau
initiated him into the mystery of finding them. But neither the Indians
nor nature nor Thoreau can invest the quiet residence of our author with
the dignity or even the suspicion of a legend. History stops short in that
direction with Charles Coolidge, Esq., and the year 1828.
There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite a low bluff
overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other sides
the level land stretches away. Towards Lexington it is a broad,
half-marshy region, and between the brook behind and the river good
farms lie upon the outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by
the desire of conversing with the man whose written or spoken
eloquence has so profoundly charmed them, and who have placed him
in some pavilion of fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no
porch of philosophy nor academic grove, but in a plain white house by
the wayside, ready to entertain every comer as an ambassador from
some remote Cathay of speculation whence the stars are more nearly
seen. But the familiar reader of our author will not be surprised to find
the "walking eye-ball" simply sheltered, and the "endless experimenter
with no past at my back" housed without ornament. Such a reader will
have felt the Spartan severity of this intellect, and have noticed that the
realm of this imagination is rather sculpturesque than pictorial, more
Greek than Italian. Therefore he will be pleased to alight at the little
gate, and hear the breezy welcome of the pines and the no less cordial
salutation of their owner. For if the visitor knows what he is about, he
has come to this plain for bracing mountain air. These serious Concord
reaches are no vale of Cashmere. Where Plato Skimpole is architect of
the summer-house, you may imagine what is to be expected in the
mansion itself. It is always morning within those doors. If you have
nothing to say, if you are really not an envoy from some kingdom or
colony of thought and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped pile, you had
better pass by upon the other side. For it is the peculiarity of Emerson's
mind to be always on the alert. He eats no lotus, but for-ever quaffs the
waters which engender immortal thirst.
If the memorabilia of his house could find their proper Xenophon, the
want of antecedent arrowheads upon the premises would not prove very
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