had some hesitation about it, notwithstanding its faithful observation and its fine sketches of the pickerel-fisher and of the woodchopper, on account of mannerism, an old charge of mine,—as if, by attention, one could get the trick of the rhetoric; for example, to call a cold place sultry, a solitude public, a wilderness domestic (a favorite word), and in the woods to insult over cities, whilst the woods, again, are dignified by comparing them to cities, armies, etc. By pretty free omissions, however, I have removed my principal objections.163
When James Russell Lowell omitted one sentence from Thoreau’s essay “Chesuncook” in 1858, Thoreau was uncompromisingly vehement when he said that the “editor has, in this case, no more right to omit a sentiment than to insert one, or put words into my mouth.”164 In relation to “A Winter’s Walk” and Emerson’s edits, he was much more forgiving. Whether simply from this happening earlier in his writing career, or out of deference to his friend, he wrote Emerson, “I doubt if you have made more corrections in my manuscript than I should have done ere this, though they may be better; but I am glad you have taken any pains with it.”165
“I don’t like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” Thoreau wrote after months in New York. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. . . . The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.”166 One highlight, however, was the theologian Henry James, about whom Emerson had said “you must not fail to visit.”167 Thoreau found in James someone who
makes humanity seem more erect and respectable. . . . He is a man, and takes his own way, or stands still in his own place. I know of no one so patient and determined to have the good of you. It is almost friendship, such plain and human dealing. I think that he will not write or speak inspiringly; but he is a refreshing forward-looking and forward-moving man, and he has naturalized and humanized New York for me. He actually reproaches you by his respect for your poor words. I had three hours’ solid talk with him, and he asks me to make free use of his house.168
But he was not happy with his situation.
I do not feel myself especially serviceable to the good people with whom I live, except as inflictions are sanctified to the righteous. And so, too, must I serve the boy. I can look to the Latin and mathematics sharply, and for the rest behave myself. But I cannot be in his neighborhood hereafter as his Educator, of course, but as the hawks fly over my own head. I am not attracted toward him but as to youth generally. He shall frequent me, however, as much as he can, and I’ll be I.169
When he received a letter from Lidian in June, he started reading it but decided to go
to the top of the hill at sunset, where I can see the ocean, to prepare to read the rest. It is fitter that it should hear it than the walls of my chamber. . . . I am almost afraid to look at your letter. . . .
You seem to me to speak out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. Your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens as from the paper.170
It is clear from his answer to Lidian that they shared an emotional intimacy that each sometimes failed to find in Emerson, and that there was a confidence and trust that, again, they missed in Emerson. “My dear friend,” Thoreau wrote her, “it was very noble in you to write me so trustful an answer. It will do as well for another world as for this.” They were connected. “I think I know your thoughts without seeing you, and as well here as in Concord. You are not at all strange to me.” She confided to him about her “sad hours,” the result of some physical ailment. In closing he expressed the “joy your letter gives me,” and sent his “love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness I slowly recognize.”171
In September, among other local news, Emerson lamented the conditions of the Irish laborers who had come to lay down the tracks for the railroad that would be extending past Walden Pond to Fitchburg.
Now the humanity of the town suffers with the poor Irish, who receives but sixty, or even fifty cents, for working from dark till dark, with a strain and a following up that reminds one of negro-driving. Peter Hutchinson told me he had never seen men perform so much; he should never think it hard again if an employer should keep him at work till after sundown. But what can be done for their relief as long as new applicants for the same labor are coming in every day? These of course reduce the wages to the sum that will suffice a bachelor to live, and must drive out the men with families. The work goes on very fast.172
Thoreau may not have felt Emerson’s sympathy went far enough. Although he didn’t do it, Emerson briefly contemplated selling his home in Concord. Thoreau told his friend, “The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins and pigs and children revelling in the genial Concord dirt, and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.”173
In mid-November Thoreau was in Concord to spend Thanksgiving with his family and to give a lecture. He was back in New York the first week of December, but his brief visit home may have been an overwhelming reminder of what he was missing; in two weeks he returned home to Concord for good. He asked Emerson to tie up any loose ends with his brother; Emerson sent William thanks from Thoreau “for the purse and says that the Pindar he will return through me, and says that he left nothing of any value at all in his chamber. You will please use your discretion with any matters found there.”174
Although the New York adventure did not yield the results everyone had hoped for, Thoreau did have two pieces published outside The Dial—“A Walk to Wachusett” in the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion and “Paradise (to be) Regained” in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. “I could heartily wish,” Emerson wrote his friend while still in New York, “that this country, which seems all opportunity, did actually offer more distinct and just rewards of labor to that unhappy class of men who have more reason and conscience than strength of back and of arm.”175 Soon Thoreau would enter a new phase in his writing career, a prolific period in which he wrote, or began to write, his two most famous works: Walden and “Civil Disobedience.”
“It matters not how small the beginning may seem to be,” Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience.”176 His move to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, was just such a