A Turn Down the Harbor

Barry Kritzberg

Chicago Literary Club

January 26, 2009

The next time you pick up Henry Thoreau’s Walden, pay attention to the epigraph, for it is a strong hint on how the enigmatic Mr. Thoreau’s book should be read.

The epigraph, important enough to be on the title page of the 1854 first edition and repeated in the text, states, “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”[1]

If we take heed of the hint that hyperbole is one of the author’s favorite rhetorical weapons, we will not make the mistake of reading him literally, and we will have a greater appreciation and understanding of his ironic wit and sarcastic humor.

In “Economy,” the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau is bragging as lustily as chanticleer to wake his neighbors up about, among other things, education.

“I would not pursue the common course,” Thoreau writes, “which is to send [the student] into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practiced but the art of life;—to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye, to study chemistry and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar….To my astonishment, I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why\one turn down the harbor would have taught me as much.”[2]

One turn down the harbor: this sounds, indeed, like the characteristic crowing of chanticleer, but it is also based on Thoreau’s sometimes overlooked adventures at teaching the young.

Henry Thoreau was one of the lucky few in his Harvard graduating class to land any job at all during the economic depression of 1837.

Teaching had been as much a Thoreau family tradition as ministering had been to the family of his neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Concord (Massachusetts) school committee offered him a salary of $500 to teach in the Central School, the very one Thoreau himself had attended up to about the age of ten.

Some 90 pupils were registered, but only 52 or so showed up on an average day. Most of the more ambitious students, those very few bound for college, had moved (as Thoreau himself had done) on to the private Concord Academy.

His students were mostly farm boys and girls, and one might safely assume that their interest in learning was, with fifty or more crowded into a single room, very slight indeed.

Deacon Nehemiah Ball, of the school committee, dropped in at the end of the second week to see how Thoreau was faring in his new role.

The good Deacon Ball, taking note of what he perceived to be unruliness in Thoreau’s class, called him aside and urged him—even though the Concord School Regulations specifically instructed its teachers to abstain as much as possible from corporal punishment—to flog students now and again or “the school would spoil.”

Thoreau promptly called out several pupils (including the Thoreau family maid), and, lacking a proper instrument for flogging, whacked them with a ferule (used, principally, for slapping the knuckles). He tendered his resignation that evening, and his experiment in public education ended almost before it fairly began.

Henry told his family that the kind of order the committee desired was inconsistent with his own notion of what teaching should be like.[3]

Thoreau’s ideas on education, as radical surely as his notions about economics and government, were once a much-neglected topic in Thoreau scholarship, but less so recently.

There is no doubt, however, that whether Thoreau was at the head of a classroom or not, education was virtually a life-long concern. His ideas on education foreshadowed many of the “novel” notions of John Dewey’s progressivism and the methods of Maria Montessori and were far from the arbitrary capriciousness suggested by his willful obedience to the suggestion of Deacon Ball.[4]

Indeed, Thoreau had little faith in the efficacy of corporal punishment in the classroom. “I have been ever disposed to regard the cowhide as a non-conductor,” he wrote Orestes Brownson (December 30, 1837). “Methinks that unlike the electric wire, not a single spark of truth is ever transmitted through its agency to the slumbering intellect it would address. I mistake, it may teach a truth in physics, but never a truth in morals.”[5]

He did not, by any means, believe in the “do your own thing” school of education. He would have been shocked and appalled by the complete lack of rigor and discipline to be found, say, in John Neal’s 1960’s educational experiment at Summerhill.

Henry had a classical education (at Concord Academy and, later, at Harvard) and, although he advocated learning by experience, direct contact with nature, and even physical education, he never doubted the importance of books. One has only to read the Walden chapter on reading to confirm that.

Thoreau did, indeed, spend several hours a day communing with nature, but it is often overlooked by those who go into raptures about Thoreau’s views of Nature, that there were just as many (if not more) hours devoted to reading and writing on those very same days. His journals, alone, fill fourteen printed volumes, almost two million words; Walden was thoroughly revised and rewritten—not merely copied over—seven times.

His formal education began at Miss Phoebe Wheeler’s private infant school in Concord, where he learned his ABC’s and won a medal for geography. One wonders how he attained such a prize, for when he brought it home, he asked his mother if Concord were in Boston.[6]

At the Central School, where he was later to teach, boys and girls of all ages were expected to learn passages of the Bible and Shakespeare by rote, the method Deacon Ball would have no doubt approved.[7]

Thoreau’s classmates thought him stupid and, for his refusal to join in games, he earned the solemn nickname of “Judge.” He was not as gregarious as his older brother John and he certainly did not win any popularity contests at school.

At the age of eleven, in 1828, Thoreau was sent to Concord Academy, where the tuition was five dollars per quarter. His teacher, Phineas Allen, thoroughly knew five foreign languages and was regarded as a “perfect encyclopedia of information to all inquiring minds.”

The aim of the Academy was to prepare boys for Harvard and while the emphasis, therefore, was on reading the Greek and Roman classics, Allen also gave lessons in a number of other areas, including history, astronomy, mathematics, and botany.

Allen also required frequent English themes of his pupils and one of Thoreau’s essays, written probably when he was about eleven, survives. The title, “The Seasons,” suggests that Thoreau’s interest in nature began a long while before he retired to the cabin he built at Walden Pond to conduct his experiment in fronting the essential facts of life.

There are four seasons in a year [Thoreau began] Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, I will begin with Spring. Now we see the ice beginning to thaw, and the trees to bud. Now the winter wears away, and the ground begins to look green with the new born grass. The birds which have lately been to more southern countries return again to cheer us with their morning song.

Next comes summer. Now see a beautiful sight. The trees and flowers are in bloom. Now is the pleasantest part of the year. Now the fruit begins to form on the trees and all things look beutiful.

In Autumn we see the trees loaded with fruit. Now the farmers begin to lay in their Winter’s store, and the markets abound with fruit. The trees are partly stripped of their leavs. The birds whith visited us in Spring are now retireing to warmer countries, as they know that Winter is coming.

Next comes winter. Now we see the ground covered with snow, and the trees are bare. The cold is so intense the rivers and brooks are frozen.

There is nothing to be seen. We have no birds to cheer us with their morning song. We hear only the sound of the sleigh bells.[8]

It is no doubt a satisfactory composition, for an eleven-year-old, but Phineas Allen would have marked him down for beginning his composition with a run-on sentence and for his wayward spelling of beautiful, leaves, which and retiring.

Henry did not seem to hold his teacher in high regard, however. Later, he wrote to his class secretary at Harvard: “I was fitted, or rather made unfit, for college at Concord Academy and elsewhere, mainly by myself, with the countenance of Phineas T. Allen, preceptor.”[9]

Yet, when Allen returned to Concord for a visit almost two decades later, Henry Thoreau was the only former pupil he chose to visit. [10]

By the summer of 1833, Thoreau’s last quarter at Concord Academy, he was acquiring knowledge of a different kind. He built his own rowboat, prophetically named “The Rover,” and spent many an hour drifting and day-dreaming on Walden Pond. “Idleness,” he wrote in his journal later, “was the most attractive and productive industry.”[11]

John Thoreau and his sister Helen took teaching jobs to help defray the cost of sending their brother Henry to Harvard, where he studied, along with the required Greek and Latin classics, Italian, French, German and Spanish. He also discovered the library, and realizing that he might not always have access to it, began to make extracts in commonplace books of what he fancied in his wide reading.

He was, contrary to popular belief, a better than average student, never ranking below the twenty-second place (in a class that ranged from 42 to 50), and one term as high as sixth.

Thoreau took advantage, too, of an 1835 Harvard regulation which allowed a student to take a leave of absence from his studies in order to teach and earn money for tuition. Thoreau applied for a position in Canton, Massachusetts and was interviewed by Orestes Brownson, then the Unitarian minister.

Brownson, who had an intellect to match his ego, kept Thoreau engaged in an animated conversation until past midnight. The young man, he concluded, was qualified to teach his own children, who were in the school.

The Rev. Brownson and Thoreau took a liking to each other and they embarked on a mutual pursuit of German. The encounter with Brownson was important, for Thoreau later wrote that his weeks with Brownson were “an era of my life—the morning of a new Lebenstag.” Although little is known about his teaching there—not even how long he stayed—Thoreau was sufficiently confident of his success to ask Brownson afterwards for a recommendation.

His class rank earned him a place as one of the speakers at the 1837 commencement exercises and he joined two classmates in addressing the “commercial spirit of modern times.” The seeds of the philosophy which led Thoreau to his Walden retreat could be seen even then:

The order of things should be somewhat reversed [Thoreau said]; the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul,—in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of nature.[12]

The 1837 commencement was memorable for another reason also. Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered “The American Scholar,” as the Phi Beta Kappa address, though it is by no mean certain that Henry stayed in Cambridge another day to hear his older Concord neighbor present what has often been called “the American intellectual declaration of independence.”

Thoreau’s formal education, then, from the Concord Central School to Harvard, seems to have been as conventional as one could imagine.

There was something about that education, however, that put him on his mettle, that made him seek to be a teacher who was not in the conventional mode at all.

In his request for a letter of recommendation from Orestes Brownson, Thoreau gave a brief indication of the kind of teacher he hoped to be. “I would make education a pleasant thing to both the teacher and the scholar. This discipline, which we allow to be the end of life, should not be one thing in the classroom and another in the street. We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”[13]

Thoreau applied for a number of teaching positions, in Virginia, Maine, and elsewhere but failed to secure any, despite having references from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rev. Ezra Ripley, and Harvard president Josiah Quincy.

Henry, meanwhile, casually continued his informal education by reading, exploring nature in and about Concord, and by having frequent conversations with Emerson and, somewhat later, Bronson Alcott, better known today as the father of the author of Little Women than as a philosopher.

More than a year went by and Thoreau, without any teaching prospects elsewhere, opened a school of his own. It began rather slowly, with only four pupils, but eventually expanded to the point where he and his brother took over the Concord Academy.

The brothers did not use corporal punishment, but relied instead on persuading their charges that learning was the desired end for both teacher and pupil.

When Henry overheard a student cursing, Thoreau called the class together and said: “Boys, if you want to talk business with a man, and persisted in thrusting words having no connection with the subject into all parts of every sentence—boot-jack, for instance,—wouldn’t you think he was taking a liberty with you, and trifling with your time, and wasting your own?”

Thoreau then demonstrated the superfluous nature of swearing by randomly interjecting boot-jack into a series of sentences. It was a humorous lesson, more memorable and more effective, surely, than a rap on the knuckles. (I propose bootjack, by the way, as a useful alternative to the contemporary penchant for like and you know as all-purpose connectives and modifiers.)

Thomas Hosmer, who walked each day the five miles from Bedford to Concord to attend the Thoreau brothers’ school, recalled that Henry was very skilled at engaging pupils' attention and winning their respect.

The Concord Academy, as run by the Thoreau brothers, was certainly among the earliest in the United States to advocate and practice learning by experience. The Academy had, to be sure, its lessons and recitations, but it also made walks to the woods and sailing on Walden Pond and the Concord River a regular feature of instruction.

These were not merely trips to give harried teachers and pupils a breather from the classroom. Most pupils fondly recalled their natural history lessons in the woods and fields of Concord and most came away with a delightful sense of wonder that one could only get in the company of a master teacher.

The students, so amazed by Henry’s intimate knowledge of nature, felt, as George Hoar, one of the pupils explained, that “if anything happened in the deep woods which only came once in a hundred years, Henry Thoreau would be sure to be on the spot at the time and know the whole story.”[14]

Henry knew the flowers of his native Concord so intimately that he could tell his pupils the likely date of the earliest appearance on any wild flower. A trip to the woods was also an occasion for a history lesson, and Thoreau, in relating the stories of the Indians who once occupied those spots, could demonstrate the validity of his assertions by unearthing arrow heads and other implements almost by magic.

The knowledge he conveyed to his pupils of the flora and fauna of Concord, furthermore, was not of the dry-as-dust technical variety. One student said, in fact, that Henry knew the animals and plants as “one boy knows another with all their delightful little habits and fashions.”

When some of the students, on an excursion to Goose Pond, were arguing about whether the loud chirping they heard as they approached the pond came from frogs or not, Henry said nothing. At the pond, he captured a frog and put it in his hat, returned the hat to his head, and waited for the frog to settle the dispute. He then showed them the loose skin about the frog’s throat that swelled out like a bladder when chirping.

Only the dullest student might fail to remember such a lesson.

Not all of the excursions were to the woods. Students were also taken, for example, to the offices of the Yeoman’s Gazette to see how type was set, and to Pratt’s gunsmith shop to see how gun sights were accurately determined. A lesson in mathematics might be offered by having the students use a surveyor’s instrument to do some actual calculations, and husbandry was taught by having each pupil plant and be responsible for a small plot of land on the school grounds.

It is no wonder that former pupils remembered the Thoreau brothers fondly. George Keyes recalled that Henry was “thoroughly alive and a very pleasant talker” and Thomas Hosmer described children “running after Henry and catching him by the hand so they could hear more of his wonders.”

Thomas Hosmer gave a picture, too, of Henry’s morning talks, which began each day’s lessons. His talks “showed that he knew himself there to teach broadly and to awaken thought,—not merely to hear lessons in the rudiments of letters.”

Another Hosmer, Horace, recalled that the Thoreau school was “a peculiar one. There never was a boy flogged or threatened, yet I never saw so absolutely military discipline. How it was done I scarcely know. Even the incorrigible were brought into line.”

This academic collaboration of the Thoreau brothers lasted only three years. It was John’s poor health—he had the family disease, tuberculosis, the one which would kill Henry at age forty-four—that led him to withdraw from the venture and Henry decided not to carry on by himself. John died a little more than a year later, but it was not of tuberculosis. He cut his finger while stropping a razor and contracted lock-jaw, suffered intensely for two weeks, and died in Henry’s arms.

The school was a century ahead of its time and, while some of educational practices of the Thoreau brothers were no doubt derived from Bronson Alcott’s famous Temple School in Boston, their methods were even more radical than Alcott’s.

Thoreau left no treatises on education, but scattered through his journals and other writings are little gems that give insight into his pedagogical ideas.

It is not surprising to discover that this Yankee Greek (as Vernon Louis Parrington aptly called him) was a Platonist. He expressed a preference for the humble doubter over the one who thought he knew it all, and added, “I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun.”[15]

That Platonic idealism was coupled with that shrewd Yankee practicality, for Thoreau insisted that students “should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.”[16]

Thoreau had a way of illustrating what he meant by direct and pointed comparison, as when he suggested it might be profitable to take children into a grove of primitive oaks now, “before they are all gone, instead of hiring botanists to lecture to them when it was too late.”[17]

He had suggestions, too, which have become the watch-words of nature conservancies, Audubon Societies and Sierra Clubs.

“Each town,” he wrote, “should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession for instruction and recreation….We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses. We are all schoolmasters and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last.”[18]

He was impatient of all dry-as-dust scientific investigations, and proclaimed, “there is no such thing as purely objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective….I look over the report of the doings of a scientific association and am surprised that there is so little life to be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry technical terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of these learned professors has been almost as inhuman as a rain-gauge or self-registering magnetic machine. They communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of blood-heat. It doesn’t all amount to one rhyme.”[19]

He looked on all branches of formal learning, in fact, with equal scorn. “How vain it is,” Thoreau once complained, “to teach youth, or anybody, truths! They can only learn them after their own fashion, and when they get ready….They get a valuable drilling, it may be, but they do not learn what you profess to teach. They at most only learn where the arsenal is, in case they want to use any of its weapons.”[20]

Knowing where that metaphorical arsenal is, however, is one of the steps toward that independence of thought that Thoreau valued so highly.

All that he taught, and the way he taught, it seems to me, might be suggested by three famous passages from Walden: “This is the only way, we say; but there as many ways as radii can be drawn from one center,” and in what is possibly an echo from Hamlet, “the universe is wider than our views of it,” and, finally, the concluding line of the book, “the sun is but a morning star.”

The advanced educational theories practiced by the Thoreau brothers are not what the students remembered, however. They remembered, instead, how delightful it was to spend their days learning things with Henry and John.

There seems to be little doubt that Henry often preferred the company of children to adults. He had a reputation for being sharp-tongued with certain adults, especially those self-inflated souls who wore their virtue like badges of honor.

One, whom Thoreau described as the kind of greasy reformer who couldn’t wait to rub up against you, announced, on being introduced to Henry, that he knew all about him and wanted to plumb his very depths.

“I trust,” Henry replied, “that you will not strike your head on the bottom.”

A minister once pounced on Thoreau by saying, “Oh, here’s the chap who camps in the woods,” and Henry shot back with, “Oh, here’s the chap who camps in the pulpit.”

Such remarks, of course, did not go very far in winning friends and influencing people.

Henry, by contrast, was welcomed by children everywhere. They seemed to intuitively sense that Henry was one of their own, an adult to be trusted, an adult who was fun. And, although his formal classroom teaching ended (save for two relatively brief private tutoring ventures with the Emerson family), he was never too busy to share his wisdom with the young people of Concord in ways that seemed quite natural and not at all like the stuffy atmosphere of the classroom.

Moncure Conway, a frequent visitor to Concord while studying at Harvard Divinity School, accompanied Thoreau on some of his outings with children.

“Upon such excursions,” Conway related, “his resources for our entertainment were inexhaustible. He would tell stories of the Indians who once dwelt thereabout, until the children almost looked to see a red man skulking with his arrow on the shore; and every fish, turtle, frog, lizard about us was transformed by the wand of his knowledge from the low form into which the spell of our ignorance had reduced its princely beauty. One of his surprises was to thrust his hand softly into the water and raise up before our astonished eyes a bright fish which lay in his hand as if they were old acquaintances! If the fish had also dropped a penny from its mouth, it could not have been a more miraculous proceeding to us.”[21]

An anonymous lady, who knew Thoreau when she was a child, reported that he would often appear at their door at dusk and entertain her and her brother with engaging tales of his adventures in the woods and stories of his childhood. He would sing, on occasion, his favorite ballad, Tom Bowline, or play on his flute. He might also perform some magic tricks—swallowing his knife, or fetching coins from the children’s ears—and no one could make pop-corn like Master Henry.[22]

John Albee, who while conversing with Emerson on a visit in 1852, noted that Thoreau entertained the children. “Emerson was talking to me,” Albee said, “and I was only conscious of Thoreau’s presence as we are of those who are about us but not engaged with us. A very pretty picture remains in my memory of Thoreau leaning over the fire with a fair girl on either side, which somehow did not comport with the subsequent story I heard of his being a hermit.”[23]

The Concord-born Edward Simmons, later a well-known painter of murals, explained the seeming contradiction in Thoreau by shrewdly observing that he “who had no walks to throw away on company,” would not hesitate to “devote his entire afternoon in search of a fox with a boy of ten.”[24]

Mary Hosmer Brown, in her Memories of Concord, related that children “hailed his coming with delight. It was better than any fairy tale,” she said, “to listen to his stories of the woods or the river. To hear him talk they would gather round as still as mice.”[25]

Not everyone, of course, was an admirer of Thoreau. Celia P.R. Frease, who perhaps was introduced to Thoreau by Horace Greeley, recalled that Henry loved nature as much as he disliked people.

“He had written one book then,” she recalled. “He gave me a copy. I’ve forgotten the title.”[26]

Julian Hawthorne, son of the author of The Scarlet Letter, on the other hand, found something almost mystical in his encounters with Thoreau. One incident he related was about water-lilies, which Henry said were worth seeing in the morning, when the first rays of the sun caused them to unfurl their hidden beauty.

When Henry turned “those terrible blue eyes” on Julian, and said “worth seeing,” he could not resist. “All the strange man said was gospel to me,” Julian noted, “and I silently resolved to get up early some morning, and witness the exquisite drama.”[27]

A young Irishman who had settled in Concord, Edward Neally, recalled that Thoreau didn’t scorn him, as Thoreau’s superior neighbors often did. Henry often invited Neally to carry the chains on his surveying ventures and, in the process, awakened the lad’s interest in natural history. Later, Neally would become a collector for the Smithsonian and acquire quite a reputation as an amateur authority on, of all things, Concord fauna and Indian relics.

Perhaps the greatest youthful admirer of Thoreau was Edward Waldo Emerson, the son of the Sage of Concord. Edward Waldo wrote a most delightful, affectionate portrait, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend.

Edward Waldo was moved to write the book, he said, because he was troubled by “a want of knowledge and understanding” of Thoreau’s character, not only by writers (such as James Russell Lowell) who hardly knew him at all, but also by Henry’s fellow towns-men, including Edward Waldo’s father, who, in his 1862 funeral oration for Henry, developed an influential, but too narrow a portrait of Thoreau as “hermit and stoic.”

“[Thoreau’s] youthful, cheery figure was a familiar one in our house,” Edward Waldo explained, “and when he, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, sounded his note in the hall, the children must needs come and hug his knees, and he struggled with them, nothing loath, to the fireplace, sat down and told stories, sometimes of the strange adventures of his childhood, or more often of squirrels, muskrats, hawks, he had seen that day, the Monitor-and Merrimac duel of mud turtles in the river, or the great Homeric battle of the ants."[28]

“He taught us, also,” Edward Waldo continued, “the decorum and manners of the wood, which gives no treasures or knowledge to the boisterous and careless; the humanity not to kill a harmless snake because it was ugly, or in revenge for a start; and that the most zealous collector of eggs must always leave the mother bird most of her eggs, and not go too often to watch the nest.”[29]

When Edward Waldo went to college, Thoreau counselled him that the library “was the best gift Harvard had to offer,” and Thoreau knew of what he spoke. He used the library all of his life, fighting for—and winning—the privilege of taking books out even when he was no longer a student there.

John Albee, who was so struck by the picture of Henry by the fire with Emerson’s children, recalled another occasion when Ralph Waldo and Henry were discussing, at Albee’s prompting, what would be the best kind of education.

“Emerson,” Albee explained, “pleaded always for the college; said he himself entered at fourteen. This aroused the wrath of Thoreau, who would not allow any good to the college course. And here it seemed to me that Emerson said things on purpose to draw Thoreau’s fire and to amuse himself. When the curriculum at Cambridge was alluded to, and Emerson casually remarked that that most of the branches were taught there, Thoreau seized the opportunity and replied, ‘Yes, indeed, all of the branches and none of the roots.’”[30]

At this, Emerson heartily laughed.

The man who could and make the transcendental sage of Concord laugh, the man who could awaken that sense of wonder in child after child was, in short, quite a teacher, as, I trust, my turn down the harbor has demonstrated.

Notes

1. Henry Thoreau, Walden, edited and annotated by Walter Harding (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 81.

2. Thoreau, Walden, 48-49.

3. Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Dover, 1985), 52-53.

4. Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, (New York University Press), 158-159.

5. Carl Bode and Walter Harding, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York

University Press: 1958), 19-20.

6. Harding, Days, 17-18.

7. Harding, Days, 19.

8. Harding, Days, 27.

9. Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (Concord, Massachusetts: Thoreau

Foundation, Inc., 1962), 21.

10. Meltzer and Harding, Profile, 25.

11. Harding, Days, 30-31.

12. Harding, Days, 50.

13. Harding, Days, 55.

14. Harding, Days, 82.

15. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (eds.), The Journal of Henry Thoreau (Salt Lake City:

Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., 1984), II, 167-68.

16. Thoreau, Walden, 48.

17. Torrey and Allen, Journal, XIV, 210.

18. Torrey and Allen, Journal, XII, 387.

19. Torrey and Allen, Journal, VI, 237-38.

20. Torrey and Allen, Journal, XIII, 67.

21. Walter Harding, Thoreau as Seen by His Contemporaries (New York: Dover, 1989), 56-57.

22. Meltzer and Harding, Profile, 59-60.

23. Harding, Contemporaries, 107-09.

24. Harding, Contemporaries, 147-48.

25. Harding, Contemporaries, 149.

26. Harding, Contemporaries, 209.

27. Harding, Contemporaries, 165.

28. Edward Waldo Emerson, Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (Concord, Massachusetts:

Thoreau Foundation, Inc., 1968), 3.

29. Emerson, Thoreau Remembered, 7.

30. Harding, Contemporaries, 108.