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10 May 1858. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Going down-town in the morning, I hear the warbling vireo, golden robin, catbird, and summer yellowbird . . .

  About 8.30 A.M., I go down the river to Ball’s Hill . . . 

  P.M.—To Walden. R. W. E. [Ralph Waldo Emerson] is sure that he heard a cuckoo to-day . . .

(Journal, 10:409-412)
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal on 11 May:

  Yesterday with Henry T. at the pond saw the creeper vesey vesey vesey. Yorick is the veery, or Wilson’s Thrush. The lamprey-eel was seen by Wetherell building the pebble nest in the river. The dead sucker so often seen in the river needs a great deal of air & hence perhaps dies when detained below. The trout was seen to kill the pickerel by darting at him & tearing off a fin every time. I hear the account of the man who lives in the wilderness of Maine with respect, but with despair. It needs the doing hand to make the seeing eye, & my imbecile hands leave me always helpless & ignorant, after so many years in the country. The beauty of the spectacle I fully feel, but ’tis strange that more than the miracle of the plant & any animal is the impression of mere mass of broken land & water, say a mountain, precipices, & water-falls, or the ocean side, and stars. These affect us more than anything except men & women. But neither is Henry’s hermit, 45 miles from the nearest house, important, until we know what he is now, what he thinks of it on his return, & after a year. Perhaps he has found it foolish & wasteful to spend a tenth or a twentieth of his active life with a muskrat & fried fishes. I tell him that a man was not made to live in a swamp, but a frog. The charm which Henry T. uses for bird & frog & mink, is patience. They will not come to him, or show him aught, until he becomes a log among the logs, sitting still for hours in the same place; then they come around him & to him, & show themselves at home.
(The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 14:203)
10 May 1860. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  River six and one eighth inches below summer level.

  Thermometer at 2 P.M., 71 . . .

  P.M.—To Bateman’s Pond . . .

  Going over the hill behind S. Brown’s, when the crossed the triangular space between the roads beyond the pump-maker’s, I saw countless little heaps of sand like the small ant-hills, but, looking more closely, the size of the holes (a little less than a quarter of an inch) and the comparative irregularity of the heaps—as if the sand had been brought forth and dropped in greater quantity at once—attracted my attention and I found they were the work of bees . . .

(Journal, 13:287-288)
10 May 1861. Concord, Mass.

Ellen Tucker Emerson writes to her sister, Edith:

  I forgot to tell you. I went to Mr Thoreau’s to carry him a map. He said he was going to Minnesota tomorrow, (and Father says it is all a mistake that he is to send him. Mr T. goes at his own expense, tell Cousin Mary) and Horace Mann with him, so I asked him to dine and he accepted. Father said he should buy Mr Minot’s piece today. The dinner talk was 1/2 Nat. Hist. and 1/2 politics.
(The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, 1:250)

10 May 1862.

The Boston Transcipt and the Salem Observer note Thoreau’s death.

Concord, Mass. The Concord Monitor prints “Thoreau” by Franklin B. Sanborn, which is later printed in a corrected form on 24 May:

Hush the loud chant, ye birds, at eve and morn,
  And something plaintive let the robin sing;
Gone is our Woodman, leaving us forlorn,
  And veiled with tears the merry face of Spring.
Our woods and pastures he for other groves
  Forsakes and wanders now by fairer streams;
Yet not forgetful of his earthly loves,—
  Ah, no! for so affection fondly dreams.
Dear One! ’T were shame to weep above thy grave,
  Or doubtingly thy soul’s far flight pursue;
Peace and Delight must there await the brave,
  And Love attend the loving, wise, and true.
Thy well-kept vows our broken aims shall mend,
  Oft as we think of thee, great-hearted friend!
10 November 1818. Chelmsford, Mass.
Henry D. Thoreau’s father rents the Spaulding store (Journal, 8:65; The Days of Henry Thoreau, 11-12). He is aided by a recommendation from Rev. Ezra Ripley:
  Understanding that Mr. John Thoreau, now of Chelmsford, is going into business at that place, and is about to apply for license to retail ardent spirits, I hereby certify that I have been long acquainted with him, that he has sustained a good character, and now view him as a man of integrity, accustomed to storekeeping, and of correct morals.
(The Life of Henry David Thoreau, 33)
10 November 1835. Cambridge, Mass.

Thoreau attends a meeting of the Institute of 1770 in which Edward Augustus Renouf reads passages from A Few Weeks in Paris during the Residence of the Allied Sovereigns in that Metropolis by Theodore Lyman and the topic “Ought gambling to be punished as a criminal offence?” is debated (The Transcendentalists and Minerva, 1:83).

10 November 1836. Cambridge, Mass.

Henry D. Thoreau checks out The works of the late William Cowper, volume 3 from Harvard College Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 288).

10 November 1838. Concord, Mass.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal:

  My brave Henry Thoreau walked with me to Walden this P.M. and complained of the proprietors who compelled him to whom as much as to any, the whole world belonged, to walk a strip of road & crowded him out of all the rest of God’s earth. He must not get over the fence: but to the building of that fence he was no party. Suppose, he said, some great proprietor, before he was born, had bought up the whole globe. So had he been hustled out of nature. Not having been privy to any of these arrangements, he does not feel called on to consent to them, and so cuts fishpoles in the woods without asking who has a better title to the wood than he.
(Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 7:143-144)
10 November 1840. New York, N.Y.
Ellen Sewall writes in her diary on 16 November:

  Tuesday was quite unpleasant but notwithstanding the mud Mary & I went up in the village in the evening to see our friend Elizabeth Hunt . . . That evening I received a letter of business from Father, Tuesday eve (transcript in The Thoreau Society Archives at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods; MS, private owner)

Sewall also writes to her aunt Prudence Ward on 18 November:

  Last week Tuesday, the day I sent my last letter to you I received one from Father. He wished me to write immediately in a “short, explicit and cold manner to Mr. T.” He seemed very glad I was of the same opinion as himself with regard to the matter. I wrote to H. T. that evening. I never felt so badly at sending a letter in my life. I could not bear to think that both those friends whom I have enjoyed so much with would now no longer be able to have the free pleasant intercourse with us as formerly. My letter was very short indeed. But I hope it was the thing. It will not be best for either you or me to allude to this subject in our letters to each other. Your next letter may as well be to Mother perhaps, or Edmund. By that time the worst of this will be passed and we can write freely again. I do feel so sorry H. wrote to me. It was such a pity. Though I would rather have it so than to have him say the same things on the beach or anywhere else. If I had only been at home so that Father could have read the letter himself and have seen my answer, I should have liked it better. But it is all over now. We will say nothing of it till we meet . . . Burn my last
(transcript in The Thoreau Society Archives at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods; MS, private owner)
10 November 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  This morning the ground is once more whitened with snow, but it will apparently be gone in an hour or two . . . (Journal, 3:102-104).

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