Emerson's Walden.

Richardson, Robert D.

Walden will always be associated with Henry Thoreau. It should also be associated with Emerson. Everyone knows that Thoreau built his cabin on Emerson's land at Walden Pond; it is less often recalled that Emerson not only owned land out there (which his family made sure would be kept open to the public forever) but also that Emerson himself had a primary, crucial, spiritual connection to Walden. Emerson loved the pond and the woods, and they were absolutely vital to his own life and work. For Emerson, who walked out to Walden almost every day for many years, Walden meant renewal, new possibilities, the morning of the mind, and from his Walden walks came his writings. He once thought of calling his second published book Forest Essays. Perhaps he should have.

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On October 4, 1844, which just happened to be the day after Herman Melville stepped ashore at Boston from his years of travel in the South Seas, Emerson, out at Concord, wrote to his brother William in New York that he had "lately added an absurdity or two to my usual ones, which I am impatient to tell you of. In one of my solitary wood-walks by Walden Pond, I met two or three men who told me they had come thither to sell and buy a field, on which they wished me to bid as a purchaser." Emerson is quick to point out that this is not just any old field. "As it was on the shores of the pond, and now for many years I had a sort of daily occupancy in it, I bid on it, and bought it, eleven acres for $8.10 per acre. The next day I carried some of my well-beloved gossips to the same place and they deciding that the field was not good for anything if Heartwell Bigelow should cut down his pine-grove, I bought, for 125 dollars more, his pretty wood lot of three or four acres, and so am landlord and waterlord of 14 acres, more or less, on the shore of Walden, and can raise my own blackberries." The purchase of course had consequences. "I am now, like other men who have hazarded a small stake, mad for more.... Mrs Brown wishes me to build her a cottage on some land near my house; and the dreaming Alcott is here with his Indian dreams that I helped him to some house and farm in the Spirit Land!" Emerson had just sent off the proofs for Essays: Second Series. He explained to his brother that his purchases were "the light-headed frolics of a hack of a scribe when released at last from months of weary tending on the printers devil." (1)

Brother William was unimpressed, partly because times were hard and neither brother had money to spare. But it is also clear from William's reply that he thought the Walden area was already ruined, indeed violated, and not worth acquiring. "If you had bought the shores of Walden Pond" he wrote his brother, "before they were thrown open to the garish eye of railroad traveler, I should not have marveled. But I confess I shall hardly think those years bring you wisdom, if you throw away even these cheap acres upon such a sieve (pardon the confusion of the metaphor) as the orphic philosopher." William obviously didn't think much of Bronson Alcott, but he added, gamely, "If you want any money to complete your purchase, I will furnish whatever you call for." (2)

Whatever William might think, the purchase was clearly an important one for Emerson. To his English friend Thomas Carlyle he wrote; "and when shall I show you a pretty pasture and woodlot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town called Walden Pond. One of these days, if I should have any money, I may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the treetops and spend my nights as well as days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me." (3)

But it wasn't Alcott, or Lucy Brown or Emerson who came to Walden and built a cabin; it was Henry Thoreau who did so, perhaps in response to a letter from Ellery Channing suggesting that he, Thoreau, go out to Walden and "begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive." (4) Thoreau did not think Walden the "chief ornament" of Concord. He says in Walden that White Pond is prettier; but no one was offering Thoreau the use of his White Pond land. Thoreau's stay at Walden had, finally, spectacular results. Walden was not only the place of his own renewal and rebirth, it has become an internationally recognized symbol of the possibility of taking your life into your own hands and of awakening to the real joy and beauty of a life close to nature. So enthusiastically did Emerson recognize the association of Thoreau with Walden that he left him the land his cabin was on in his will. After Thoreau left the cabin in pursuit of other lives, Emerson changed this part of his will, for he was not eager to just get rid of his Walden land.

Thoreau came out to Walden in March of 1845. He moved in on July 4, which he says was an accident; this is one of the few things Thoreau ever said which no one believes. In November of 1845, Emerson bought, for twelve hundred dollars, forty more acres over on the other side of the pond. As the years passed, Emerson paid careful attention to his Walden land. He had to. It was his woodlot, his source of energy for house heat and cookstove. But Emerson's wood often burned before he could get to it; there were a lot of fires out there during the nineteenth century.

In 1848--Thoreau having left the pond by now--Emerson tried to sue the Fitchburg Railway for setting fire to the woods near Walden. (5) In 1871 there was another fire at Walden woods. (6) After Emerson's death the family held on to the Walden property. It was, after all, still their woodlot. In 1889, seven years after Emerson's death, there was another big fire during the springtime. (7) In 1891, Edward Emerson bought Fuller's woodlot, adjoining his father's. In 1892, there was yet another fire, which burned over several people's woodlots, but missed the Emerson's. (8) Eventually--and I am not going to detail the steps--the Emerson family turned the Walden land they had acquired and kept together over to the public. In this way, the Emerson family made possible the preservation of Thoreau's sacred place, just as Emerson himself had made possible Thoreau's going there in the first place. So if we think of Emerson's Walden lands in a practical way as his energy source, we can also think of him as the benevolent landlord and waterlord of the place, his first and most spectacular tenant being Henry Thoreau and the latest being the general population of the surrounding area which was, and is, woefully short of public swimming places.

But this is not all. In fact none of the preceding is the main thing about Emerson's Walden. For after we are done talking about money and firewood and congenital helpfulness, there is the fact that Emerson really loved Walden Pond and its woods, and his inner connection with them was absolutely vital to his own life and work.

Richard K. Nelson, who has written a couple of wonderful books about the Pacific Northwest, one of which is about an island, says of his island that "it is no more inherently beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth. What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart." (9) There is no doubt at all that Walden Pond and Walden Woods buried themselves very deeply inside Emerson's heart. His comment to Carlyle about going to live in the "midst of a beauty which never fades for me" has a romantic finality and an unmistakable strong sense of longing about it.

The real depth and importance of Emerson's ties with Walden are I think best attested through his writings, of course, but also through his children, each of whom had something remarkable to say about their father's favorite place. And Emerson himself clearly associated the pond with his children. They took walks with him there, swam in summer, skated in winter, botanized, watched for birds; they took visitors to see it. Of his first child, Waldo, Emerson said he was as "handsome as Walden Pond at sunrise."

Emerson's third child and second daughter, Edith, strongly associated her father with the Pond. Even as a girl she was, she remembered later, very much aware of him as a poet and she "connected his blue eyes and fresh appearance with Concord's skies, woods and Walden Pond." She "had an idea that Waldo and Walden had some relation to each other." (10)

The whole family used to go for walks to Walden. Here is an account by Ellen Emerson, Edith's older sister. Ellen is here 19, writing to Edith, who is away in Cambridge at boarding school. The family sets out in a fine drizzling rain on Dec. 6, 1858: "The snow was five or six inches deep with a strong hard crust, which yet did not bear and we all three sank at every step. Everything was covered with ice. It was preparing for a glass day tomorrow. As we crossed the pasture the town clock struck four.... We got into the road all locking step and treading in Father's tracks in profound silence." Ellen's account continues, reminding us with her vivid prose and good ear, that she too could be an impressive nature writer. "There was a wonderful feeling about the day. It was very still and all the air and the distance were white and when we came to Dandelion Pool all the tall pines in fairy land, black, and hanging heavy with ice and snow, and as still as everything else, made us stop and see." Ellen's account reminds one of Thoreau's "A Winter Walk." Walden affects people that way. "Then we turned into the unbroken Walden Path; the very road we had been walking on had not a track in it, and we went into the woods, every tree with the same still heavy look that Fairyland had, and at every step we took, for now we no longer walked in one track, the loud crunk of the breaking crust. We went down to the cove and saw Walden and stood to hear how still it was, and the owl made that noise on the other side of the pond, just once, very faint and far away." (11)

But it was Edward, Emerson's second son, a physician, and editor of his father's work, who later gave the single most thoughtful account of Walden's attraction for Emerson. For the place really pulled Emerson, as it still does some of us now. Edward notes that in those days if you stood outside the Emerson house in Concord on the Lexington Road, you would see "low hills on your southeast horizon clothed with a continuous wood which hid Walden among its oaks and dark pines." "He went to work," Edward writes, "in the garden below his house, but the sight of the great garden across the brook but half a mile off was strong to lure him away." Brister's Hill, the beginning of Walden country, lies half a mile from Emerson's house. Half a mile further was Thoreau's hut site.

Edward quotes his father: "Look at the sunset when you are distant half a mile from the village, and I fear you will forget your engagement to the tea party. That tint has a dispersive power not only of memory but of duty. But the city lives by remembering." (12)

Walden was Emerson's greater garden, as Edward recognized, pointing out that Emerson's poems "My Garden" and "Walden" were originally one poem. My Garden is a forest ledge Which older forests bound; The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge, Then plunge to depths profound. Self-sown my stately garden grows; The wind, and wind-blown seed, Cold April rain and colder snows My hedges plant and feed.

Edward comments on this association, saying of his father, "Brought up mainly near the city, with mind filled in youth with such images of nature as pets of an artificial age and a long-cultivated island had reflected in their more or less distorted mirrors, he had come to study nature at the fountain head, and found, as he had suspected or he would not have come, that all was new." (13)

What Emerson found at Walden was the new world, and the message of his work, to Henry Thoreau and to us, is that the world is still new, that it continues to be new to each person. Emerson reflected on this in an 1838 Journal passage, a large part of which went into his talk on "Literary Ethics" at Dartmouth on July 24, 1838. "It seems," he wrote, "as if we owed to literature certain impressions concerning nature which nature did not justify. By Latin and English poetry, I was born and bred in a oratorio of praises of nature, flowers, birds and mountains, sun and moon, and now I find I know nothing of any of these fine things, that I have conversed with the merest surface and show of them all; and of their essence or of their history know nothing. Now furthermore I melancholy discover that nobody--that not these chanting poets themselves know anything sincere of these handsome natures they so commended; that they contented themselves with the passing chirp of a bird or saw his spread wing in the sun as he fluttered by, they saw one morning or two in their lives, and listlessly looked at sunsets and repeated idly these few glimpses in their songs."

Now he lays his own experience over the poetic template. "But if I go into the forest, I find all new and undescribed; nothing has been told me. The screaming of wild geese was never heard; the thin note of the titmouse and his bold ignoring of the bystander; the fall of the flies that patter on the leaves like rain; the angry hiss of some bird that crepitated at me yesterday; the formation of turpentine, and indeed any vegetation and animation, any and all are alike undescribed." What was true for him in his private heart he knew to be true for others. "Every man that goes into the woods seems to be the first man that ever went into a wood. His sensations and his world are new.... the fact is, morning and evening have not yet begun to be described."

This is not just preparing the way for Thoreau; Emerson himself began the process of devouring himself alive at Walden: "When I see them [the mornings and evenings] I am not reminded of these Homeric or Miltonic or Shakespearian or Chaucerian pictures but I feel a pain of an alien world, or I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsation and life to the very horizon. That is Morning; to cease for a bright hour to be prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the world." (14)

For Emerson, Walden meant renewal, new possibilities, the morning of the mind, and from his Walden walks came his writings. Many of his poems started there. He once thought of calling his second book Forest Essays. Perhaps he should have.

To the end of Emerson's life, Walden continued to exert its pull on him. On April 2, 1882, just a little shy of his eightieth birthday, Emerson and Ellen walked out to Walden once more. It was "a delicious spring day after a week of cold." (15) It was his last look. Three weeks later he was dead. But the pond, which he loved, which he saved, and which was the symbol and the reality of renewal for him, is still there and--as anyone will tell you who has the opportunity to go there at six in the morning--still lives in all its original glory.

Notes

(1) The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (Columbia UP, 1939), p. 263.

(2) William Emerson to RWE Oct 8, 1844.

(3) Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1888). p. 369.

(4) The Correspondence of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York University Press, 1958), p. 161.

(5) Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner's, 1949), p. 362.

(6) Rusk, p. 452.

(7) The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 2, ed. Edith W. Gregg, (Kent State UP, 1982), p. 607.

(8) The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 2, p. 640.

(9) Richard K. Nelson, The Island Within (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), p. xii.

(10) Rusk, p. 363.

(11) The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, vol. 1, p. 155.

(12) Edward Waldo Emerson, p. 58.

(13) Edward Waldo Emerson, p. 59.

(14) The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Harvard UP, 1965), pp. 468-69.

(15) Rusk, p. 507, identified in the notes (p. 551, no number) as from an unpublished letter from Ellen Tucker Emerson to Clara Dabney, 2 April 1882.