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from the toiling farmer, stood the family of Samuel Hoar, who had married a daughter of Roger Sherman, (the Connecticut statesman, bred a shoemaker) and who stood in Emerson's mind for something consular and generous, as indeed he was. His daughter, Miss Elizabeth Hoar, who would have married Charles Emerson, but for his early death, was one of the dearest of Emerson's Concord friends, and his counsellor in many matters, intellectual and spiritual. He called her "Elizabeth the Wise," and praised her cheerful outlook on life, the admirable fairness of her mind, and her true and delicate sensibility. One distinction made by her and cited by Mr. Cabot, though it has the advantage of being reported in Emerson's exquisite diction, should be given here, to show the quality of her intelligence: "Elizabeth defined common sense as the perception of the inevitable laws of existence. The philosophers considered only such laws as could be stated; but sensible men

banished with him from that ungenerous State, which in its love of human slavery, forgot its own canons of courtesy. This drew from Emerson the remark,-"There is but one man in South Carolina, as far as I can see; the rest are but repeaters of his mind,”—and that man, of course, was Calhoun. Samuel Hoar died in 1856; Elizabeth, in 1880; of her brothers, one (Edward) was the companion of Thoreau in some of his excursions; the others are Judge Hoar and Senator Hoar. Their mother it was, who said of Thoreau: "He talks about Nature just as if she had been born and brought up in Concord."

Perhaps Nature had that birth and training, it was a good place for her. But Henry Thoreau certainly was born and bred in the town, of which Elizabeth Hoar said, "Concord is his monument, adorned with inscriptions by his own hand." He was born in the old-fashioned house which Miss Richardson's sketch has restored to its primitive aspect, -- for

though standing yet, it has been removed, after the Concord fashion, to another site, and has lost the quaint sloping roof, which gave it an old-world character, like the similar farmhouse in Torrington, Ct., where John Brown was born. This "Minot house" (for Thoreau was born in the home of his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Minot, in July, 1817,) stood on the right hand of the "Virginia Road," as you come from Lexington to Concord by that route," an old-fashioned, winding, at length deserted pathway." Channing calls it, "the more smiling for its forked orchards, tumbling walls, and mossy

great tract sometimes called Bedford levels,' where rises the Shawsheen river." Thoreau only lived in this house eight months, yet such was his memory that he could remember a flock of ducks which his baby eyes rested on there. As a child he was next brought to the village of Concord - from which his birthplace is distant more than a mile to the northeast

and in that village and its environing woods, he lived nearly all his life. He died in the Alcott-Thoreau house on the village street, half-way between the river bank and the Fitchburg railroad, in May, 1862. The trees around this house, as

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Henry Thoreau's fath

er, and which he handed down to his children. This house was purchased by Louisa Alcott, in 1877, after the death of Sophia Thoreau, the last of the children, and it was the home of the Alcott family for nearly ten years. Mrs. Alcott died there in October, 1877, and Mr. Alcott was there attacked in October, 1882, with the paralytic stroke from which he never fully recovered. He left this house in 1886, and died in Boston, March, 1888. The house stands on the south side of the street, facing the north, and directly opposite, during Thoreau's lifetime, stood the house of Ellery Channing, whose garden ran to the river bank; and there under a rank of tall willows, Thoreau kept his last

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boat. His first boat, with which he and his brother John sailed down the Concord River and up the Merrimack, in 1839, had been made over to Hawthorne in 1843, and was that in which Hawthorne and Channing made their excursions up the Assabet, as described in "Mosses from an Old Manse."

When, in October, 1834, Emerson came to reside with his mother in the Old Manse, Thoreau, a lad of seventeen, was at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1837; Alcott was newly returned from Philadelphia to Boston, to begin there his famous and unfortunate Temple School; Hawthorne had not emerged from his dim chamber at Salem, where he wrote tales, and waited for the age to find him out; and Channing was a lad of sixteen in Boston, having left the Round Hill School at Northampton, where he had for fellow

View from Eastern Hill.

pupils, much older than himself, Motley, the historian, and T. G. Appleton, the wit of Boston. Emerson himself was at that time but one and thirty; Alcott, thirty-five; Hawthorne, thirty. Thoreau was native to Concord, and Emerson had ancestral roots there; but it was partly chance and partly mutual attraction which brought these friends all together by the winding river, in 1842. Emerson had thought of a possible retreat to the Berkshire hills, or even to the Maine woods; and when in 1834-5 he became engaged to Miss Jackson, of Plymouth, she sought to fix his residence in that town. His reply is worth noting, as it indicates how early he had chosen the vocation of poet. He wrote in the spring of 1885: "I am born a poet, of a low class, without doubt, yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation.

My singing, be sure, is

very husky, and is for the most part, in prose. Still, I am a poet, in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter. A sunset, a snowstorm, a forest, a certain river-view, are more to me than many friends, and do ordinarily divide my day with my books. Wherever I go, therefore, I guard and study my rambling propensities. Now Concord is only one of a hundred towns in which I could find these necessary objects, but Plymouth, I fear, is not one. Plymouth is streets." This was conclusive, and Concord was chosen. So was the site of their new house, for in April, 1835, he wrote to his brother in New York; -"I hope to hire a house and set up a fireside next Sep

Emerson's Journal, "to the top of Dr. Ripley's hill, and renewed my vows to the genius of that place. Somewhat of awe, somewhat grand and solemn, mingled with the beauty that shined afar, around. I beheld the river, like God's love, journeying out of the gray past into the green future." In some verses of the same period, but little known, he gives this companion picture of sunrise:

"Stand upon this pasture hill,

Face the Eastern star, until
The slow eye of heaven shall show
The world above, the world below.
Behold the miracle!

Thou saw'st but now the twilight sad,
And stood beneath the firmament
A watchman in a dark gray tent,
Waiting till God create the Earth,

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given the present slope and vestment of this hill, looking towards "the green Musketaquid," and across it to the opposite slope of Ponkawtasset, where afterwards stood Channing's "small cottage on the lonely hill." The projected house was never built, for Emerson bought a house elsewhere, and Charles Emerson died in May, 1836.

Already in 1834 had Emerson's first book, "Nature," begun to take form, and it is traditional that it was mainly written in the Old Manse. It came out anonymously, and when the inquiry was made in 1836, "Who is the author of Nature?" some wit had his answer ready-"God and Waldo Emerson." With this little book New England Transcendentalism was introduced to the world, — not, as Emerson playfully said afterward, "as a known and fixed element like salt or meal," but as a vivid and rather indefinite potentiality. Yet, such as it was, it had a long career and noteworthy results. In consequence, partly, of Emerson's marriage in Plymouth, for all practical purposes thereafter, Concord and Plymouth were the two shire-towns of Transcenden

talism; and though Alcott, Emerson, Channing, and Thoreau were more at home in Concord, they were familiar with Plymouth, too - its Pilgrim Rock, its Hillside garden, its warm, sandy wood roads (warm in winter and cool in summer), and its breezy Island out in the bay. It was while preaching and lecturing at Plymouth in 1833-4, that Emerson became the lover and the betrothed of Miss Jackson (whom he married in September, 1835), and it was one of the towns where he continued to lecture for years. ton Watson, of Plymouth, who was at Harvard College with Thoreau, and who, after graduating in 1838, took to gardening and tree-planting on a hillside of his native town, was one of the Transcendental circle, and made his country house of Hillside a resort for the brethren of the faith. Alcott thus describes the spot, in a sonnet to Watson :

Mars

"Thou, better taught, on worthiest aims intent, Short distance from the Pilgrim's sea-washed street

Thine orchard planted; grove and garden there And sheltering coppice hide thy mansion neat, By winding alley reached, and gay parterre;

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