# Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau/Prefatory Note

PREFATORY NOTE.
LEARNING that Thoreau had once a Western correspondent, and knowing that these of his letters had not been published, it occurred to the slightly irascible and somewhat eccentric ex-professor that it were worth while to make search therefor: possibly that correspondence might be recovered. Thoreau's correspondent was found without difficulty,—an aged and venerable man,—and to the great surprise of the ex-professor the holographs were transferred to his keeping, and are used by the present editor in preparing the text of this book.
​Thoreau's letters are in themselves but a trifle, yet they give characteristic glimpses of him; those of his sister reveal a phase of his character that is not so widely known as it deserves, and in justice to a dead man should be.
The story of these simple letters is briefly as follows: George Kipley's review of Walden; or, Life in the Woods, led a distant reader to write to Ticknor and Company for a copy, the chief incitement being the liberal citations from the book itself. Upon receiving the volume it was almost literally devoured; a somewhat peculiar spiritual experience had prepared the way for it with that remote reader; he then found it sweet in the mouth, and after forty years it has not proven bitter in the belly. ​Of course the book had "found" its reader, as Coleridge would say of such a divine conjunction, and like the famishing charity boy, that particular reader wanted "some more." That earnest man, reading Walden, and one of the few of that day able to read it 'between the lines,'—reading and pondering under the burr-oaks in the silence of the forest solitude,—
"—felt like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken."
From the title-page of Walden he learned that Thoreau was also the author of another book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Failing to obtain a copy of this from the publishers of Walden or any other source then known to him, ​the seeker managed to get Thoreau's address and made application directly to him; and there the correspondence begins.
Thoreau and his Western correspondent never met, though at one point of the hopeless journey to Minnesota in search of health one hour's ride would have brought them together; but the doomed pilgrim knew that he must speedily return to put his house in order, for he was not deceived in regard to his bodily condition. "I think," he wrote to Mr. Bicketson, "that, on the whole, my health is better than when you were here; but my faith in the doctors has not increased."
The correspondence with Sophia E. Thoreau arose from a letter of condolence, on the death of her brother, written more than a month ​after that event. A subsequent visit to Concord brought the distant friend and the Thoreau survivors face to face: it was the res angustæ domi alone that had prevented such a meeting with Thoreau himself. The visitor from afar was tenderly received by both the mourning mother and sister and Thoreau's friends Alcott and Channing. Before returning, the pilgrim was requested by both Mrs. Thoreau and Sophia to select from the library of his departed friend some books for keepsakes. Thus it came that both the ex-professor and the present editor saw and touched the very copy of Lemprière's Classical Dictionary that had been Thoreau's when he was an undergraduate in Harvard College, the first flyleaf bearing the autograph: "D. H. Thoreau." This is written in ink, ​while on the succeeding leaf is the pencilled inscription, "Mr. . . . from S. E. Thoreau." The book selected as a memento for the visitor's wife is an American edition of The Spectator, two volumes in one, Philadelphia, 1832. On the title-page is an autograph, in a fine clerkly hand: "J. Thoreau." It is the signature of Thoreau's father, a man, according to one biographer, "who led a plodding, unambitious and respectable life in Concord village." It is not mentioned whether he 'kept a gig'; but commend us always to the 'plodder' who, from his scanty means, provides his family book-shelf with a substantially bound and well printed copy of the Spectator. One can readily believe that such a man was respected, gigless though he be; but few would have the hardihood to declare that a ​father who furnishes the Spectator for his children's reading is 'unambitious.' Perhaps the highest ambition lies in a wise forecast that is not for one's self;
"But Brutus says he was (un)ambitious; And Brutus is an honorable man."
The sterling native worth of Thoreau's Western correspondent was quickly discerned by not only Thoreau's mother and sister: Thoreau's friends recognized and honored it. The transparent-souled Alcott was moved to the highest issues of friendship, as sundry inscribed presentation copies of the writings of that belated Platonist amply testify; and William Ellery Channing, the "man of genius, and of the moods that sometimes make ​genius an unhappy boon," was thawed into human warmth, as specially inscribed copies of his books—perhaps the most elusive "first (and only that) editions" that ever mocked the book-hunter's desire—amply show, on those precious shelves, where the ex-professor and the present editor saw them for the first and only time. One who has been allowed access to those richly laden shelves may be allowed, without violating the sanctity of hospitality, to bear witness to the simplicity, sincerity, and serenity investing the eventide of a true life with that ineffable splendor which has in it the soul's strongest assurance of a dayspring beyond the mists of Life's mirage.
The Froude letter and that which authenticates it are not considered irrelevant. The English historian's ​letter to the Concord "loafer" is introduced to show that although his first book was 'despised and rejected' of men, Thoreau had the assurances that are always vouchsafed to the solitary thinker, and these from sources so diverse as Oxford University, justly proud of the achievements of its scholars, and the primeval oak forest of a remote young State,—a raw settlement, as it had been called only fifty years before. It is not whence the apprehension, the agreement, the assent; it is who agrees, assents, and by the cordial handgrasp conveys ​to the solitary scholar, whose meditations have disturbed Mammon's market-place, the calm, unfaltering courage that is ever a marvel to the multitude, which quietly 'bears the fardels' of unthinking servitude.
The difference between the fibre of a Froude and a Thoreau will be quickly distinguished by those who have read the exculpatory preface especially written for the second edition of Froude's Nemesis of Faith. Froude faced the angry storm of incensed detraction with the courage of a well-equipped scholar and the dignity of a true gentleman; nevertheless he had made an 'explanation': not the whole world could have moved Thoreau's lips to anything other than a smile of infinite commiseration; he would not have foregone a single furlong of his accustomed ​'walk'; he might indeed have whispered to his own heart,
"Time cannot bend the line which Truth hath writ."
The present editor has assured himself that Froude's presentation copy of his self-sacrificing Nemesis of Faith is to this day in Emerson's library at the old home, but he has not been able to learn that Froude also sent a copy to Thoreau; so it is a safe inference that Thoreau read Emerson's. A phrase in Froude's letter to Thoreau shows conclusively that Thoreau had learned of Froude from Emerson and that Thoreau had read Froude's ill-starred Nemesis—the "wild protest against all authority, Divine and human," as that gentlest of Quakeresses, Caroline Fox, ​terms it. Froude writes this phrase within inverted commas: "not on account of his [Emerson's] word, but because I myself have read and know you." This can refer only to a complimentary copy of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that had been previously sent to Froude either by Thoreau or their mutual friend Emerson. Thoreau himself has recorded that of his still-born book some 'seventy-five copies were given away.'
Froude's Nemesis of Faith could transmit no seismic tremors to the man who would have nothing between him and Heaven—not even a rafter. The blue dome with its inscrutable mystery: nothing must obstruct the soul's view of that! The chapter in Thoreau's Week entitled "Sunday" could readily carry ​to Froude the assurance that possibly he, too, had
"Builded better than he knew,"
that very possibly the angry Anglican hierarchy had merely mistaken a Church colic for a universal cataclysm.
These two recalcitrants never touched hands, albeit the 'steam bridges' were both commodious and convenient. Their perigeum occurred during Froude's much later visit to Emerson, and it was in Sleepy Hollow burying-ground; but that perihelion was sadly incomplete: six feet of graveyard mould and death, the mystery of mysteries, intervened. For both of them now, no more of that mystery. Oh, the boon of 'crossing the bar'!
​A word in regard to the unusual manner in which the Letters are presented to the reader. One with whom, of all men living, the present editor is best acquainted (an effete ex-professor, gouty, grouty, and gray-headed) made these Letters the subject of a lecture delivered in aid of a Women's Gymnasium ("More power to their elbows!" said the ex-professor) located—it is not necessary to specify where. The text as written for that occasion has been followed: a convenience which all editors will folly appreciate. At the risk of marring the symmetry of the printed page the labor-saving editor will take the liberty of superposing such patches of his own plain homespun upon the ex-professor's tapestry as occasion seems to demand (though he may be tempted of the devil to ​take undue advantage of so rare an opportunity). Being himself "as mild a mannered man as ever cut a throat," he owes it to himself to gently but plainly deprecate the ex-professor's lapses into the sarcastic. Both the editor and Herr Teufelsdröckh believe that sarcasm is the Devil's patois. As that is perilous stuff, he'll have none of it; the ex-professor must stand for his own petard: a proposition which he will be the last man to reject.
The typewritten text of the ex-professor's lecture is disfigured with pen-and-ink interlineations, and this is something so unusual that one who knows him so well as doth the editor could not resist the very natural curiosity which led to the asking for an explanation. This, as it fell from the ex-professor's lips, is too characteristic ​of him to be withheld; so it shall be shared with the reader—though this complaisance involves the editor in not a little personal peril.
Be it known then, first of all, that the ex-professor himself takes Thoreau very seriously; does not by any possible interpretation consider him a "glittering generality," but rather a "blazing ubiquity" wherever and whenever the blunt, plain truth is needful—which time and place he also believes is always and everywhere. Perhaps an excerpt from the ex-professor's lecture on "Thoreau" will best serve to show his attitude. (This lecture, it may be as well to add, was written for and delivered in a nameless territory where 'success' is a matter of the bank-book rather than of that old-fashioned Hebrew Book.)
​"I am chiefly desirous of enforcing one consideration regarding this man Thoreau, namely: that the brief episode in his life by which he is commonly known—the shanty life at Walden Pond—was not the vagary of an enthusiast. Reared in a family to every member of which 'life was something more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of ambition or an incessant scramble for the common objects of desire,' Thoreau never lost sight of the high ideal which inspired that humble household.
"While yet an undergraduate he believed that the mere beauty of this world transcended far all the convenience to which luxury would debase it. He then thought 'the order of things should be somewhat reversed; the seventh should be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living ​by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul,—in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature.'
"With darkened eyes Milton dreamed of Paradise Lost; with an unfaltering trust in the beneficence of God Thoreau went forth in the broad daylight to find it. Who shall say of him that he failed of his quest; who shall declare to the struggling millions of Earth's toilers that Paradise is, indeed, irretrievably lost!
"Once before there came to the race a man wearing a garment of camel's hair, eating locusts and wild honey, and bearing a Message: perhaps this, too, is the veiled purpose of him who abode in that much-derided shanty at Walden Pond.
​"Do we not hear the sounds as of satanic revelry coming from high places in the land; is not every breeze burdened with the muttered curses of ill-requited labor toiling for the task-masters until the sweat of the brow is that of a Gethsemane which is only the Devil's?
"The message-bringer to the nineteenth century said: Simplify your lives! It is indeed a simple message, but it is fraught with terrible meaning for us all. If the foundations of this republic are to remain unshaken in the stress of the struggle that is even now looming darkly before us, it is the application, by all, of Thoreau's teachings that will avert or mitigate the disaster; if the end is to be only ravined ruin, then will his memory live in Literature as our everlasting reproach."
​Verily our ex-professor doth take Thoreau seriously; but there are other matters that he takes as seriously, namely, the misconceptions of Thoreau by all and sundry ineptitudes; and on such occasions the ex-professor certainly forgets the amenities—but righteous wrath hath also its own peculiar Amen! Having said this much, it is due the reader that he should be allowed to get a glimpse of the ex-professor in a 'spate.' Here is an instance from the same lecture:
"Now let us return to the shanty at Walden Pond wherein Thoreau dwelt alone for some two and a half years, supporting himself solely by his own labor and living so 'close to the bone.' Lowell has written that Thoreau went there in the self-assertive mood of a hermit whose seclusion is a declaration of his non-dependence ​upon civilization. 'His shanty life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. The tub of Diogenes has a sounder bottom. Thoreau's experiment actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted upon another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all.' I question whether in all the history of criticism a blinder misconception can be found."
[Just here the ex-professor was ​evidently heated. He took the customary sip of water with which the professional lecturer prepares his learned larynx for its next innings. Having returned the handkerchief to the left hand coat-tail pocket, the ex-professor resumed.]
"In the two royal-octavo volumes edited by Professor Norton, Letters of James Russell Lowell, there is a photogravure showing the poet sitting on the ground, by the bole of an ancient elm. His hat is off, his hair is parted in the middle (and this was fifty years ago!), his head is thrown forward so as to put his face in the most favorable position for pictorial effect; his whole attitude is of studied ease, and the hand nearest the spectator is—kid-gloved! Oh, the significance of that picture! Posing under ​an elm in whose branches the robins had built their nests long before the Norsemen's prow had grated upon the sands of the New England coast; the small birds singing around the petted poet, the fragrance of summer filling the air, the scented breeze toying with his curled locks, and he carrying into that sanctuary—the kid glove of 'Society'! Is this the man to comprehend the aim and purpose of Thoreau,—this leather and prunella combination of 'civilization' and 'culture'!
"Yes; I am aware that I am speaking of a dead man, of a man whose pig weighed more than he thought it would, if one may judge from the tone of his own early letters; of one whose living tongue tasted the seducing sweetness of earthly fame; but there is another ​dead man, one who was called away 'in the midst of his broken task, which none else can finish,' and him the kid-gloved favorite of fame and fashion has flouted. There is a time for all things; a time for the sweet charity of silence, a time also for asserting the grandeur of simple and sincere manhood: brown-handed manhood that never saluted Nature with a kid glove. De mortuis nil nisi bonum? Yes; I'll stand by that sentiment; but it can also be read, De mortuis nil nisi verum: it is well also to stand by that!
"It was Thoreau's purpose at Walden Pond to find out just how much of Lowell's confessedly 'complicated civilization' was absolutely necessary in order that Man's sojourn in Nature might be as sane and serene as became an immortal soul. Did he not ​plainly write, 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life [kid gloves not being found in that inventory], and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by ​experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.'
"In my next excursion—that journey made with closed eyes and folded hands; hands not kid-gloved; bare hands to lay hold on the realities beyond this Vanity Fair that we in our ignorance call 'Life.'
"Of a truth, Lowell, a clergyman's son, could not read the simple chart by which the son of the Concord pencil-maker shaped his course amidst the sunken rocks of Conventionality."
But the ex-professor's foibles are making us forget the pen-and-ink interlineations that are yet awaiting their explanations.
"I did not imagine," said the ex-professor on the morning after his lecture on the Letters, "that any but ​sensible people would sit an hour to hear an old fellow talk about Thoreau; but, sir, on going to the appointed place, I found myself, and most unexpectedly, facing a parlour full of frills and fine linen. An exceedingly well-dressed young man sat down at the piano, and he was immediately joined by another even more extraordinarily arrayed. One played and the other warbled something in a tongue unknown to the builders of Babel, I'll warrant. I have never in all my life felt so much out of place since the only woman to whom I ever proposed laughed outright in my face. But there was no escape; I was fairly in for it, and I did some curious thinking whilst that nice young man was warbling. The music ceased, and there was a small storm of kid-gloved ​handclapping. That disconcerted me still more; for there was my audience applauding some artistic noise which I felt in my very bones they did not understand. I had to make peace with myself before I could begin with my exposition of the Thoreau letters; so I just told them right out what I had been thinking of whilst they were listening to that incomprehensible singing. I told them I had been thinking of the rude homeliness of that shanty at Walden Pond, and that my peculiar environment just then nearly paralyzed me, and only that I had the courage of my convictions, I could not read the Thoreau letters then and there. Just then a distinguished-looking gentleman, with the greatest expanse of shirt-front I had ever seen during all my earthly career, adjusted an English monocle ​to his right eye and politely stared at me. Worse than all, it had not entered my mind that I should have bought a pair of kid gloves for the occasion.
"It is astonishing how much 'punishment' well-bred people will take fully as smilingly as do all the 'fancy'; but I held them down, sir, for a full hour of torment; and certainly some things got into the talk that were not in the text. The next day a friend, whose wife was present, told me that when she was putting on her cloak, behind a screen in the robing room, she heard one ultra-fashionable lady say to another of the same species: "Well, I never was bored so in all my life!" Then I knew that I had scored a success.—Suppose I had talked down to the level of her comprehension!"
​The ex-professor thereupon filled his pipe; the present editor found himself filled with reflections of which there is no need to make farther mention.