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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2018
As a young man, Thoreau found the pencil of American manufacture a gross and greasy tool unfit for finer uses. In a breakthrough, then, for the family business, he discovered that by grinding the graphite to a near impalpable powder, then mixing it with clay just so, a pencil could be made that would write and sketch with such elegance and precision as to out-perform the standard Old World imports. It is hard to say whether Thoreau's technological fix was an application of the New England Transcendentalist imagination or, more prosaically, a shrewd colluding with the Industrial Revolution and the global market economy. But increasingly, and especially as we observe the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth, here is where we find him most: at the pivot point between this world and a world made better by intelligence, between raw nature and its sublimated refinement into meanings. We tend rightly to suppose that we can't have too many watchers posted at that gate.
1 Boston Daily Evening Traveller, 9 Aug. 1854, 1; reprinted in Myerson, Joel, ed., Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge, 1992), 372CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 In parenthetical citations the Finley collection will be identified as “F,” the Case–Van Anglen collection as “C,” and the Walls biography as “W.”
3 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Thoreau” (1862), in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10, Uncollected Prose Writings, ed. Bosco, Ronald A. (Cambridge, 2013), 413–31, at 415Google Scholar. Hereafter cited parenthetically as “Thoreau.”
4 The subject of their relationship has, of course, received a good deal of attention elsewhere, as for example in Porte, Joel, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (Middletown, 1966)Google Scholar; Smith, Harmon L., My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau's Relationship with Emerson (Amherst, 1999)Google Scholar; Worley, Sam McGuire, Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic (Albany, 2001)Google Scholar; and Lysaker, John T. and Rossi, William, eds., Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Friendship (Bloomington, 2010)Google Scholar. The main crisis in their personal relation dates to 1849, centering primarily on the debacle of A Week, as succinctly explained in W, 266–8. Emerson had urged Thoreau to publish with James Munroe, his own publisher since 1836; that Emerson deeply regretted this bad advice is suggested by the fact that in late 1849 he dropped Munroe and went with the more aggressive publisher Phillips, Sampson, who brought out Representative Men in 1850.
5 For Thoreau's extensive notes on Emerson's poem see The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal 1: 1837–1844, vol. 1, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, William L. Howarth, Robert Sattelmeyer, and Thomas Blanding (Princeton, 1981), 279–86; reprinted as “Appendix A” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 9, Poems: A Variorum Edition, ed. von Frank, Albert J. and Wortham, Thomas (Cambridge, 2011), 677–82Google Scholar. For Coleridge and Emerson as interpreters of the Sphinx's riddle see the comments by Samantha C. Harvey and Rochelle L. Johnson (C, 155–6); and for Emerson's early encouragement of Thoreau as poet, even against the adverse opinion of Margaret Fuller, see W, 144.
6 See also C, 160, for the suggestion that the passage is likewise indebted to Coleridge. Walls (W, 355) connects the passage to Thoreau's coming to terms with death during his trip to Fire Island at the time of Margaret Fuller's shipwreck in 1850. The journal source in Emerson dates to March 1849; see Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11, ed. A. W. Plumstead and William H. Gilman (Cambridge, 1975), 75–6.
7 On 28 March 1835, Emerson wrote in his journal, “If life were long enough among my thousand & one works should be a book of Nature whereof ‘Howitt's Seasons’ should be not so much the model as the parody. It should contain the Natural history of the woods around my shifting camp for every month of the year. It should tie their astronomy, botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, & poetry together. No bird, no bug, no bud should be forgotten on his day & hour.” See Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, ed. Merton M. Sealts Jr (Cambridge, 1965), 25; and Howitt, William, The Book of the Seasons; or the Calendar of Nature (London, 1831)Google Scholar. In 1851, Thoreau proposed to undertake “a Book of the seasons—each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality wherever it may be.” Six years later he returned to this idea, expressed in language even more redolent of early Emerson: “These regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be—they were at first of course—simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons and all their changes are in me . . . The perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is at home in her!” (C, 260, original emphasis). Before he had read Emerson's Nature—which is to say before he was much touched by Romantic influences—Thoreau had read Howitt's Seasons, the latest contribution to a phenological tradition extending back, as Case points out, to the literature of classical Rome. See Sattelmeyer, Robert, Thoreau's Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton, 1988), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Richardson, Robert D. Jr, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley, 1986), 308–10Google Scholar.
8 It would be hard to construct an independent clause more utterly wrongheaded than did Henry James in calling Thoreau “worse than provincial—he was parochial.” Henry James, Hawthorne (New York, 1880), 94. Cf. Walls: “Thoreau had been instructed by the era's most deeply radical thinkers: Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass” (W, 272). One might add Walt Whitman to the list and still not get to the end of it.
9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Spiller, Robert E. and Ferguson, Alfred R. (Cambridge, 1971), 7–45, at 9Google Scholar.
10 See Buell, Lawrence, “The Emerson Industry in the 1980’s: A Survey of Trends and Achievements,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 30/2 (1984), 117–36, at 123–9Google Scholar; Lopez, Michael, “De-Transcendentalizing Emerson,” ESQ: A Journal of the America Renaissance, 34/1–2 (1988), 77–139Google Scholar; Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar; and the culminating study of Thoreau and abolition, Petrulionis, Sandra H., To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord (Ithaca, 2006)Google Scholar.
11 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, 1971), 15. One could argue that the de-Transcendentalizing gesture tends to relieve these artist–philosophers of their signature idealism (often enough a shibboleth in the American classroom), but of course it denies at the same time the very ground of their vision and poetry. This was effectively the issue in the complaint that Thoreau, at the turning point of his life, traded in his apprenticeship to Emerson for a magnifying glass and a butterfly net—and, later, an introduction to Darwin. Thus it is not surprising that Lance Newman discusses “Thoreau's materialism” (C, 17–30) and Susan Gallagher speaks for “Thoreau's antimaterialistic philosophy” (C, 46), though the writers—and Thoreau's philosophical allegiances—are not in fact offered in dialogue.
12 The symbolic imagination, which, as Emerson admitted, was intermittent and ornamental in his own poetic practice, “was in [Thoreau] an unsleeping insight” (“Thoreau,” 420). Because of this idiosyncratic wakefulness, “Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole” (ibid., 424). The long training in the double consciousness of the symbolic imagination (as the exquisite ambiguity of Emerson's syntax implies) installs order and beauty in the mind—which might be accounted a desirable end of the student's higher education.
13 This is the subject of Robert D. Richardson's especially fine essay, “The Rooster's Philosophy, or ‘The Gospel According to This Moment’” (C, 243–50).
14 See Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Circles” (1841), in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, Essays: First Series, ed. Slater, Joseph, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, 1979), 179–90, at 190Google Scholar.
15 See the discussion by Robert A. Gross (C, 114–15).
16 Stanley Cavell's discussion of Thoreau's “struggle for language” as a response to loss is discussed helpfully by David M. Robinson in “Thoreau, Stanley Cavell, and American Philosophy” (F, 313–20).
17 Walden, 171; used as epigraph for Chapter 4 of the Walls biography (W, 124) in reference to the death of John Thoreau in 1842.
18 From a journal entry of 7 Sept. 1851, quoted in the essay by Richardson to illustrate Thoreau's having come just then to understand “not only what his own religion was, but what he should be doing about it” (C, 246). See note 13 above.