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Updated: June 8, 2025
Emerson delivered sentences that only needed the setting of an essay to charm the world; but the whole visit was a vague ghost of the Monday Evening Club at Mr. Emerson's it was a great failure. Had they all been lying idly on the river brink or strolling in Thoreau's blackberry pastures, the result would have been utterly different.
But he was of Thoreau's mind, that if you can "make your failure tragical by courage, it will not differ from success." He could look back without confusion to his enthusiastic promise.
His race was softly polite, even in the forests, and Thoreau's voice, now mildly subdued, came strangely from the bearded wildness of his face. The grip of his hand was like Father Roland's something David had never felt among his friends back in the city. He winced in the darkness, and for a long time afterward his fingers tingled.
Of course Thoreau could do nothing with the wild creatures that you or I could not do under the same conditions. A snake will coil around any man's leg if he steps on its tail, but it will not be an embrace of affection; and a fish will swim into his hands under the same conditions that it will into Thoreau's.
Afterwards I witnessed, and participated in, a more radical profanation of these crystal waters, when two hundred of the dirtiest children in Boston, South-enders, were brought down by train on a fresh-air-fund picnic and washed in the lake just in front of the spot where Thoreau's cabin stood, after having been duly swung in the swings, teetered on the see-saws, and fed with a sandwich, a slice of cake, a pint of peanuts, and a lemonade apiece, by a committee of charitable ladies one of whom was Miss Louisa Alcott, certainly a high authority on "Little Women" and "Little Men."
It would seem as if the male bird sang, not to win his mate, but to celebrate the winning, to invoke the young who are not yet born, and to express the joy of love which is at the heart of Nature. When I reached home, I went over the fourteen volumes of Thoreau's Journal to see if he had made any record of having heard the "woodcock's evening hymn," as Emerson calls it. He had not.
The "Atlantic Monthly" accepted one article by Thoreau, and paid for it, but as James Russell Lowell, the editor, used his blue pencil a trifle, without first consulting the author, he never got an opportunity to do so again. Horace Greeley had interested himself in Thoreau's writings and gotten several articles accepted by Graham's and also Putnam's Magazine.
I remember every word of it, and I can give it to you. And then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human: "'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement.
Or we might say that his substance would have been worthier, if his adoration or contemplation of Nature, which is often a part of it, and which rises to great heights, as is felt for example, in La Mer, had been more the quality of Thoreau's. Debussy's attitude toward Nature seems to have a kind of sensual sensuousness underlying it, while Thoreau's is a kind of spiritual sensuousness.
Emerson was Nature's lover, but Thoreau was her scholar. Emerson's method was intuition, while Thoreau's was observation. He worked harder than Emerson and knew more, that is, within certain defined limits. Thus he read the Greek poets in the original.
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