Concord, Mass. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal:
[Alek] Therien came to see Thoreau on business, but Thoreau at once perceived that he had been drinking; and advised him to go home & cut his throat, and that speedily. Therien did not well know what to make of it, but went away, & Thoreau said, he learned that he had been repeating it about town, which he was glad to hear, & hoped that by this time he had begun to understand what it meant.
(The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 15:239)
Boston, Mass. The Atlantic Monthly prints “Mason and Slidell: A Yankee Idyll” by James Russell Lowell, which refers to the village of Concord:
But nowadays the Bridge ain’t what they show,
So much ez Em’son, Hawthorne, an’ Thoreau.
I know the village, though: was sent there once
A-schoolin’, coz to home I played the dunce;
An’ I’ve ben sence a-visitin’ the Jedge,
Whose garding whispers with the river’s edge,
Where I’ve sot mornin’s, lazy as the bream,
Whose only business is to head up-stream,
(We call ’em punkin-seed,) or else in chat
Along’th the Jedge, who covers with his hat
More wit an’ gumption an’ shrewd Yankee sense
Than there is mosses on an ole stone fence.
“Snow” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the same issue also mentions Thoreau:
. . . our prevalent association with winter, in the Northern United States, is with something white and dazzling and brilliant; and it is time to paint our own pictures, and cease to borrow these gloomy alien tints. One must turn eagerly every season to the few glimpses of American winter aspects: to Emerson’s “Snow-Storm,” every word a sculpture,—to the admirable storm in “Margaret,”—to Thoreau’s “Winter Walk,” in the “Dial,”—and to [James Russell] Lowell’s “First Snow-Flake.” These are fresh and real pictures, which carry us back to the Greek Anthology, where the herds come wandering down from the wooded mountains, covered with snow, and to Homer’s aged Ulysses, his wise words falling like the snows of winter.
(Atlantic Monthly, vol. 9, no. 52 (February 1862):188-201)
