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Henry Thoreau PDF

375 Pages·1994·10.95 MB·English
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HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 EVENTS OF 20TH STANZA The 21st Stanza in the Life of Henry Thoreau FALL 1837 JULY 1837 AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER 1837/1838 OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER 1837 SPRING 1838 JANUARY 1838 FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER 1838 APRIL MAY JUNE 1838 Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN 1837 In Boston’s economy, books rated 3d in total value produced, 2d to clothing in persons employed, and 1st in capital investment. From this year into 1851, Josiah Quincy, Jr. would be the treasurer for the initiative which became the Boston Athenæum. Nathaniel Hawthorne edited PETER PARLEY’S UNIVERSAL HISTORY. EVENTS OF 22D STANZA HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 The founding of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the 1st American school for women to have an endowment. The Concord school board had as its chair the Reverend Barzillai Frost, as its secretary Nehemiah Ball (who in this year won election as Town Clerk), and as its 3d member Nehemiah’s brother-in-law Sherman Barrett. Money for the school was being raised by a town tax, supplemented by small donations and by some state aid. 55 The budget this year would be $2,132. , of which the Centre District, the section of the system which 59 occupied the Town School building and three other more remotely located buildings, would receive $1,119. . The head of the prudential committee of the Centre District was the owner of the local grocery store, Charles B. Davis (who in this year would become Concord’s postmaster), and it would be he who would hire as the new teacher replacing Eliezer J. Marsh a recent local college graduate, Henry David Thoreau. Hiring a recent local Harvard College grad has been pretty much the tradition since 1700. Davis would agree to pay Thoreau $500 a year, which, although it would render him by far the highest paid of the more than 16 teachers employed in the system, was $100 less than had been paid in the previous year to Marsh. After Thoreau would resign the post would pass to his classmate in Harvard College’s Class of 1837 William Allen. Here is what happened as it was reconstructed (or invented!) in 1873 by Ellery Channing in THOREAU THE POET-NATURALIST / WITH MEMORIAL VERSES: Another school experience was the town school in Concord, which he took after leaving college, announcing that he should not flog, but would talk morals as punishment instead. A fortnight sped glibly along, when a knowing deacon, one of the school committee, [Nehemiah Ball] walked in and told Mr. Thoreau that he must flog and use the ferule, or the school would spoil. So he did, ferruling six of his pupils after school, one of whom was the maid-servant in his own house. But it did not suit well with his conscience, and he reported to the committee that he should no longer keep their school, as they interfered with his arrangements; and they could keep it. Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal having attended a convocation of the Concord school reform group, at which Horace Mann, Sr. spoke: Yesterday Mr Mann’s Address on Education. It was full of the modern gloomy view of our democratical institutions, and hence the inference to the importance of Schools.... Sad it was to see the death-cold convention yesterday morning as they sat shivering a handful of pale men & women in a large church, for it seems the Law has touched the business of Education with the point of its pen & instantly it has frozen stiff in the universal congelation of society. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 David Henry Thoreau made notes on Francis Beaumont’s and John Fletcher’s NICE VALOUR; OR THE PASSIONATE MADMAN in his Miscellaneous Extracts notebook. He also made extracts from a paper that had appeared in the October 1836 issue of Foreign Quarterly Review, “Friar Rush and the Frolicsome Elves of Popular Mythology.” FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW He also copied the poem that begins “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” that has often been attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (although, more likely, it had been penned by Edward De Vere, 17th earl of Oxford): My mind to me a kingdom is; Such perfect joy therein I find That it excels all other bliss Which God or nature hath assign’d. Though much I want that most would have, Yet still my mind forbids to crave. No princely port, nor wealthy store, No force to win a victory, No wily wit to salve a sore, No shape to win a loving eye; To none of these I yield as thrall,— For why? my mind despise them all. I see that plenty surfeit oft, And hasty climbers soonest fall; I see that such as are aloft Mishap doth threaten most of all. These get with toil and keep with fear; Such cares my mind can never bear. I press to bear no haughty sway, I wish no more than may suffice, I do no more than well I may, Look, what I want my mind supplies. Lo! thus I triumph like a king, My mind content with anything. I laugh not at another’s loss, Nor grudge not at another’s gain; No worldly waves my mind can toss; I brook that is another’s bane. I fear no foe, nor fawn on friend, I loathe not life, nor dread mine end. My wealth is health and perfect ease, And conscience clear my chief defence; I never seek by bribes to please, Nor by desert to give offence. Thus do I live, thus will I die,— HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 Would all did so as well as I! At the Smolensk Lutheran Cemetery on Vasilievsky Island near St. Petersburg, Russia, a headstone was added to the gravesite of Leonhard Euler. Is it possible that Henry Thoreau derived his life motto “Simplify, simplify” from the method used in algebra class? “To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray? That I may teach others to simplify their lives? —and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula?— Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared — to live more worthily and profitably?” — Henry Thoreau, September 26, 1855 HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 At the early height of his career, Waldo Emerson recorded his aunt Mary Moody Emerson’s name in his journal as the 1st on his list of his 7 most vital “benefactors” but commented also that he would rather take gifts of thought from others, “as we take apples off a tree without any thanks.” Seeing that there had recently been a state-funded geological survey, the Boston Society of Natural History propositioned the Massachusetts legislature to fund also a similar botanical and zoological survey. The new president of the society he had helped form in 1831, George B. Emerson, would not only be appointed by Governor Everett as commissioner of the survey but would himself over the following nine summers, in conjunction with the botanist Dr. Dewey, perform its investigation of trees and shrubs. A circular with twenty questions was posted to some fifty landowners in the state. During his summers the schoolmaster would be visiting shipyards in Boston and New Bedford and elsewhere along the coast, along with sawmills, machine shops, and woodworking shops fashioning furniture, agricultural implements, etc. Rebecca Stanley Mann, Horace Mann, Sr.’s sister, died. The American Institute of Instruction, with which George B. Emerson was heavily involved, secured the appointment of Massachusetts Representative Horace Mann, Sr. as Secretary of a newly formed State Board of Education. HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF EDWARD GIBBON, ESQ. WITH MEMOIRS OF HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS, COMPOSED BY HIMSELF: ILLUSTRATED FROM HIS LETTERS, WITH OCCASIONAL NOTES AND NARRATIVE, BY JOHN, LORD SHEFFIELD (London: B. Blake, 1837). This volume would be in the library of Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau would peruse it and find himself somewhat distressed by the life that was being revealed, during the winter of 1840. GIBBON’S LIFE AND WORKS According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966): “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar” WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY Chapter 4 (1837-1838) -After graduation from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau taught school in Concord but quit after two weeks as a result of a dispute over corporal punishment. He searched in vain elsewhere for a teaching position. He then turned to his father’s pencil business and through Harvard library research developed a superior pencil. Thoreau was developing his friendship with Waldo Emerson, who introduced him to members of the “Hedge Club” (begun in 1836) who became known as the Transcendentalists. Some members of the Hedge Club were: FH Hedge, Rev George Ripley, Rev Orestes Brownson, Rev Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott, Rev Theodore Parker, C.P. Cranch, Rev John Sullivan Dwight and Thoreau (in fall of 1837.) The Emerson/Thoreau friendship flourished. Many like Lowell saw him as an inferior copy of Emerson, but Emerson defended Thoreau’s originality. Bronson Alcott moved to Concord to be near Emerson and became a friend of and influence upon Thoreau. Thoreau delivered his first lecture to the Concord Lyceum on April 11, 1838. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 Yet another edition of Adam Ferguson’s THE HISTORY OF THE PROGRESS AND TERMINATION OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC (London: Jones & Co.). (Just because Henry Thoreau considers something “preserved death” doesn’t mean it isn’t going to sell like hotcakes.) 1 George W. Boynton engraved a 5 /2 inch by 5 inch map of Boston for the BOSTON ALMANAC of this year. MAPS OF BOSTON THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1837. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence: Hugh H. Brown. Walton Felch’s A COMPREHENSIVE GRAMMAR, PRESENTING SOME NEW VIEWS OF THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE: DESIGNED TO EXPLAIN ALL THE RELATIONS OF WORDS IN ENGLISH SYNTAX, AND MAKE THE STUDY OF GRAMMAR AND COMPOSITION ONE AND THE SAME PROCESS. ABRIDGED FROM A WORK PREPARING FOR PUBLICATION (Otis, Broaders and Company, 122 pages). [Volume 2832 of Harvard reading textbooks preservation microfilm project] FELCH’S GRAMMAR He would republish this in 1841 (the copy behind the big button above is actually the republished version, the original version owned by Henry Thoreau not being readily available as yet in electronic text), and would argue that the “prevailing system of grammar, which in substance we have received from the ancients, will be found, upon careful inspection, to be radically defective and erroneous; — how defective and erroneous, no one is prepared to conceive, till he has given the subject more attention than a short essay like this article could evince.” His authorial intent was to correct the absence of a progressive or ethical agenda in current grammar construction: “And in the first place, the purpose of grammar is not distinctly set forth. Indeed, it is proposed as ‘the art of speaking and writing correctly.’ Thus our grammarians would give us ‘the art’ without the science, — a heap of blind, and peradventure incongruous, rules of composition, with no principle for their basis. And it seems not to have entered their thoughts, that one may speak grammatically and yet incorrectly; — that his speech may be incorrect in point of perspicuity, meaning, fact, time, place, order, taste, manners, HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 morals, &c.” It was in this year that Concord would be erecting a Battle Monument at the Old North Bridge, commemorating the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and marking the graves of the fallen British soldiers. This would lead the above grammarian, moralist, and phrenologist Walton Felch, sometime between 1838 and 1844, to commit his act of “authorized grave robbing” (authorized, indeed, formally, by the Concord Board of Selectmen!). With full permission he recovered the skulls of two of the British soldiers, one of them with a most picturesque bullethole. The soldiers’ skulls would become exhibits for his phrenological lectures, for both of them displayed, he asserted, the same over-developed bump over the brain area of combativeness and the same deficient hollow over the brain area of merriment — soldiery, he would point out, had for such persons been a natural fit. Theirs but to do or die. Henry Thoreau copied a poem by Henry Howard, Early of Surrey into his Miscellaneous Extracts notebook: Description of Spring Wherein each thing renews, save only the Lover The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings, With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale: The nightingale with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repairèd scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things 1 Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. In South Scituate, Massachusetts a relative of the Mays, Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., little brother of Ellen Devereux Sewall, began a journal “by the suggestion of Mr. Alcott.” BRONSON ALCOTT HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838 In a continuation of the previous year’s anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic political furor, Concord postmaster John Keyes was thrown out of office because he was a Mason (and therefore –per one of the Know-Nothing controlling fantasies of the time– a man whose loyalties were to a secret cabal rather than to the American nation). Charles B. Davis became the postmaster, and would serve intermittently as postmaster for Concord from that point forward, whenever the Democrats were in power. 1. THE BOOK OF GEMS. THE POETS AND ARTISTS OF GREAT BRITAIN. EDITED BY S.C. HALL (London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street 1836-1838). Thoreau had made extracts from these three volumes into his Literary Notebook 1840-1848 and his Miscellaneous Extracts 1836-1840. THE BOOK OF GEMS, I THE BOOK OF GEMS, II THE BOOK OF GEMS, III SAMUEL CARTER HALL HDT WHAT? INDEX 1837-1838 1837-1838

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