Log Search Results

May 1849.

Thoreau’s essay “Resistance to Civil Government” is published in Æsthetic Papers (Henry David Thoreau: A Descriptive Bibliography, 191).

“Resistance to Civil Government” in Aesthetics Papers
May 1854. New York, N.Y.

Charles Scribner sends a form letter to Thoreau:

  As it is my intention to publish the coming season a work, entitled Art Encyclopaedia of American Literature, embracing Personal and Critical Notices of Authors, with passages from their Writings, from the earliest period to the present day, with Portraits, Autographs, and other illustrations, I have adopted the method of addressing to you a Circular letter, as the best means of rendering the book as complete in regard to points on which you may be interested, as possible, and as faithful as may be to the memories and claims of the families and personages whose literary interests will be represented in it. The plan of the work is to furnish to the public, at one view, notices of the Lives and Writings of all American authors of importance. As it is quite probable you may have in your possession material or information which you would like the opportunity of seeing noticed in such a publication, you will serve the objects of the work by a reply to this circular, in such answers to the following suggestions as may appear desirable or convenient to you.

  1.   Dates of birth, parentage, education, residence, with such biographical information and anecdote; as you may think proper to be employed in such a publication.
  2.   Names and dates of Books published, references to Articles in Reviews, Magazines, &c., of which you may be the author.
  3.   Family notices and sources of information touching American authors no longer living, of whom you may be the representative.

  Dates, facts, and precise information, in reference to points which have not been noticed in collections of this kind, or which may have been misstated, are desirable. Your own judgment will be the best guide as to the material of this nature which should be employed in a work which it is intended shall be of general interest and of a National character. It will represent the whole country, its only aim being to exhibit to the readers a full, fair, and entertaining account of the literary products thus far of America. It is trusted that the plan of the work will engage your sympathy and concurrence, and that you will find in it a sufficient motive for a reply to this Circular. The materials which you may communicate will be employed, so far as is consistent with the limits and necessary unity of the work, for the preparation of which I have engaged Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, who have been prominently before the public for several years in a similar connection, as Editors of the “Literary World.”

  Yours, respectfully,

  Charles Scribner

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 326-327)
mid November 1842. Concord, Mass.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal:

  Last night H. T. read me verses which pleased if not by beauty of particular lines, yet by the honest truth, and by the length of flight & strength of wing; for, most of our poets are only writers of lines or of epigrams. These of H.T. at least have rude strength, & we do not come to the bottom of the mine. Their fault is, that the gold does not yet flow pure, but is drossy & crude. The thyme & marjoram are not yet made into honey; the assimilation is imperfect.
(The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8:257)
Mid-April 1845. Walden Pond.

Thoreau writes in Walden:

  By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins’ shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Door-sill there was none, but perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and here a board which would not bear removal . . . The bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the mean while returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty five cents to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all,—bed, coffee-mill, looking glass, hens,—all but the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.
(Walden, 47-48)
mid-December 1843.

Thoreau leaves the William Emerson family on Staten Island, N.Y. and moves back to Concord, Mass. See entry 17 December.

Mid-December 1849. Concord, Mass.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal:

  Ellery [William Ellery Channing] says of Thoreau, “His effects can all be produced by cork & sand: but the substance that produces them is godlike & divine” (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 11:196).
Mid-Fall 1846. Walden Pond.

Thoreau expands the Saddleback episode in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Revising Mythologies, 254).

mid-January 1843. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau meets John Louis O’Sullivan at the Concord Athenaeum and accompanies him to the Old Manse, where Nathaniel Hawthorne is living. After tea at the Old Manse, the trio goes to the Lyceum (The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 77). See entry 16 January.

mid-June 1838. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau, with his brother John, starts a private school at the Thoreau house (The Life of Henry David Thoreau (1917), 201).

Mid-June 1847. Concord, Mass.

Evert Duyckinck returns the manuscript of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to Thoreau.

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