Sketches from Concord and Appledore | Page 9

this while in Emerson's
company--but Lowell also in his younger days affected a grave and
reserved demeanor which he afterwards became tired of and threw
entirely aside. About the time of which we speak Emerson complained
that he saw too little of Thoreau, and was afraid that he avoided him.
The man was sufficiently original. He did not pretend to be a poet, and

his prose writing is not at all like Emerson. In point of style it is purer
and more classic than either Emerson's or Lowell's; and these two lines
of his,
"In the good then who can trust. Only the wise are just,"
certainly deserve to be set up somewhere in letters of gold.
He had a strong dislike of matrimony. Once while walking across a
field with David A. Wasson he kicked a skunk-cabbage with his boot
and said, "There, marriage is like that." Lowell was without doubt right
about him in this respect. Thoreau's notions of life, like the socialistic
theories of Henry George, would if generally adopted put an end to
civilization. He wanted like the French theorists of the last century to
separate himself from the history of his race; a most dangerous attempt.
It is like cutting a tree from its roots. Wasson had many a hard
argument with him on this point, and tried to show him that customs
are the good logic of the human race: but it was too late. However,
logic is one thing and character another.
The best eulogy of Thoreau is to be found in Emerson's poetry. He is
evidently the subject of the beautiful little poem called "Forbearance."
The opening lines,
"Thou who hast named the birds without a gun; Loved the wood-rose,
and left it on its stalk; At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse;--"
This describes the hermit of blue Walden exactly. A large portion of
"Woodnotes" is devoted to an account of his pilgrimage in the forests
of Maine; and the ode to "Friendship" must have been inspired either
by him or Carlyle.
"I fancied he was fled-- And after many a year, Glowed unexhausted
kindliness, Like daily sunrise there."
He delivered a lecture one winter before the Concord lyceum on wild
apple-trees. The subject made his audience laugh, but their laughter
was of short duration. The man who had lived there so long unknown
was at last revealed before them, It was the best lecture of the season,
and at its close there was long continued applause.

HAWTHORNE.
The literary celebrities of Concord, with the exception of Thoreau,
were not indigenous. Emerson may have gone there from an hereditary
tendency, but more likely because his cousins the Ripleys dwelt there.

Hawthorne came there by way of the Brook Farm experiment. How,
with his reserved and solitary mode of life, he should have embarked in
such a gregarious enterprise is not very clear; but the election of
General Harrison had deprived him of a small government office--it
seems as if Webster might have interfered in his behalf--his writings
brought him very little, and perhaps he hardly knew what to do with
himself.
All accounts agree that he joined the West Roxbury association of his
own free-will, and without solicitation of any kind. He not only threw
himself into this hazardous scheme with an energy that astounded his
friends but he embarked in it all the money he had in the world, which
was nearly a thousand dollars. He has left no explanation from which
we might infer what his hopes or his motives were.
Since three wise men went to sea in a bowl, or the army of German
children set out for the Holy Land in the twelfth century, there was
never a more hare-brained or chimerical undertaking. I once knew of a
boy who after much reading of Robinson Crusoe, started for the woods
at five o'clock of a summer afternoon, with the full intention of
spending the night there alone. He took with him a light fowling-piece,
and some crackers in his jacket pocket. He gathered some berries and
shot some small birds, and cooked them after the Indian fashion. When
it grew dark, however, he became frightened and climbed into a tree;
but he could not sleep there, and finally returned home about one
o'clock in the morning to find his family in great agitation.
This was not very unlike the Brook Farm enterprise, which was
inspired by the writings of Fourier, a seductive French socialist and one
of the most unreasonable of men. He considered, like Diogenes, that
since all men could not be rich and comfortable, it was better that they
should all be needy and miserable. It was one of the sentimental
out-growths of the French Revolution, for which Napoleonism is
always the proper remedy.