I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss Ford. She did really wish to—I hesitate to write—marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this no has succeeded. Indeed, I wished that it might burst, like hollow shot, after it had struck and buried itself and make itself felt there. There was no other way. I really had anticipated no such foe as this in my career.225
Though she continued to correspond with Thoreau, he did not answer her letters and in one instance burned one immediately on reading it.226 Ford, remaining true to her belief that their souls were twins and that they would unite in the spirit world,227 continued unmarried until her death nearly forty years later.
Thoreau’s letters to Emerson in Europe were often filled with mundane and necessary points of business in regard to Emerson’s property, but he also regaled him with stories of his family, and how he, “such a hermit as I am” found “the experiment” as head of Emerson’s household “good for society, so I do not regret my transient nor my permanent share in it.” He found that “Lidian and I make very good housekeepers,” and that Edward “very seriously asked me, the other day, ‘Mr. Thoreau, will you be my father?’ I am occasionally Mr. Rough-and-tumble with him that I may not miss him, and lest he should miss you too much. So you must come back soon, or you will be superseded.”228
“I suppose you will like to hear of my book,” Thoreau wrote Emerson toward the end of 1847, “though I have nothing worth writing about it. Indeed, for the last month or two I have forgotten it, but shall certainly remember it again.” Publishers declined to release the book at any risk to themselves, though some were willing to print it if the author accepted the risk. “If I liked the book well enough, I should not delay; but for the present I am indifferent. I believe this is, after all, the course you advised,—to let it lie.”229
Emerson replied, “But lest I should not say what is needful . . . I am not of opinion that your book should be delayed a month. I should print it at once, nor do I think that you would incur any risk in doing so that you cannot well afford. It is very certain to have readers and debtors here as well as there.”230 Emerson’s encouragement may have pushed Thoreau to accept an offer from James Munroe & Co., publisher of The Dial in its final year, to print it at Thoreau’s risk—which, when the book failed to sell, took him several years to pay.
On May 26, 1849, Thoreau went into Boston to pick up copies of his first book. In early June Theodore Parker invited Emerson to review A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for his The Massachusetts Quarterly. Emerson declined, saying, “I am not the man to write the Notice of Thoreau’s book. I am of the same clan and parish. You must give it to a good foreigner.” He then suggested possible reviewers who might do justice to the book: “E. P. Whipple has good literary insulation and is a superior critic. Will he not try his hand on this? If not, will not Starr King? If not the one or the other, why not send it to the New Yorkers, to Henry James, Parke Goodwin, or C. Dana? The book has rare claims, and we must have an American claim and ensign marked on it before it goes abroad for English opinions.”231 It was ultimately reviewed for Parker’s journal by James Russell Lowell, who continued his condemnations of the author. Thoreau, “like most solitary men,” Lowell wrote, “exaggerates the importance of his own thoughts.”232
Thoreau was frustrated and disillusioned that Emerson had not, in his mind, done what he ought to support his first book. In the fall Thoreau wrote, among pages of strongly worded invective about friends, the more succinct, “I had a friend, I wrote a book, I asked my friend’s criticism, I never got but praise for what was good in it—my friend became estranged from me and then I got blame for all that was bad,—and so I got at last the criticism which I wanted.”233 It is unlikely that Thoreau knew all that Emerson had done to promote the book, nor that Emerson knew of Thoreau’s criticisms; Thoreau confided to his journal concerns he would not voice to his friend. In spite of it all, when Munroe sent Thoreau the unsold copies of his book, he met the occasion with humor. Four years after publication, Munroe wrote to him asking what should be done with the books, and Thoreau
had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived today by express, filling the man’s wagon,—706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. . . . I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.234
In November 1847 Lidian sent her husband a description of a domestic scene, complete with stage directions—“The three children and Mama at the worktable. Eddy on Mama’s lap”—followed by some dialogue.
Eddy. Write to Father I am a good Boy.
Edie. I want Father to come home. . . . Mr. Thoreau puts
Eddy in a chair, and then takes Eddy up in it, and carries
it about the room. . . . Mr. Thoreau jumps us every night.
Eddy. Mother, and tell him Mr. Thoreau jumped a chair
over me tonight!235
In December Waldo wrote Henry a letter that began with an appreciation for all he was doing.
It is one of the best things connected with my coming hither that you could and would keep the homestead, that fireplace shines all the brighter, and has a certain permanent glimmer therefor. Thanks, evermore thanks for the kindness which I well discern to the youth of the house, to my darling little horseman of pewter, leather, wooden, rocking and what other breeds, destined, I hope, to ride Pegasus yet, and I hope not destined to be thrown, to Edith who long ago drew from you verses which I carefully preserve, and to Ellen who by speech and now by letter I find old enough to be companionable, and to choose and reward her own friends in her own fashions.236
Henry was grateful for the letter.
My Dear Friend,
I thank you for your letter. I was very glad to get it—And I am glad again to write to you. However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port.
I am here still, and very glad to be here—and shall not trouble you with my complaints because I do not fill my place better. I have had many good hours in the chamber at the head of the stairs—a solid time, it seems to me.237
Emerson’s first letter to his friend in the new year opened with adulation before reporting on a talk he had heard. “Let who or what pass,” he wrote, “there stands the dear Henry,—if indeed any body had a right to call him so,—erect, serene, and undeceivable. So let it ever be!”238 Earlier that month Thoreau wrote that not only had he “read a part of the story of my excursion to Ktaadn to quite a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested,” but “I have also written what will do for a lecture on Friendship.”239