Log Search Results

Mid-June 1862. Concord, Mass.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal:

  Henry T. remains erect, calm, self-subsistent, before me, and I read him not only truly in his Journal, but he is not long out of my mind when I walk, and, as to-day, row upon the pond. He chose wisely no doubt for himself to be the bachelor of thought and nature that he was,—how near to the old monks in their ascetic religion! He had no talent for wealth, & knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. Perhaps he fell, all of us do, into his way of living, without forecasting it much, but approved & confirmed it with later wisdom.
(The Journals and Miscellaneous of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 15:261-262)
mid-November 1843. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau returns home to spend Thanksgiving with his family and to deliver a lecture to the Concord Lyceum (Thoreau, 148).

mid-Summer 1844.

Thoreau takes a walking tour from Shelburne Falls, down the Deerfield River Valley, to Hoosac Mountain and the rest of the Berkshires and the Catskills, meeting William Ellery Channing en route at the foot of Mount Greylock (Emerson Society Quarterly 21 (1975):82-92; The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau, 30-31).

Thoreau reflects in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

  I once saw the day break from the top of Saddle-back Mountain in Massachusetts, above the clouds. As we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog, let me tell this story more at length.

  I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days, plucking the raspberries by the wayside, and occasionally buying a loaf of bread at a farmer’s house, with a knapsack on my back which held a few traveler’s books and a change of clothing, and a staff in my hand. I had that morning looked down from the Hoosac Mountain, where the road crosses it, on the village of North Adams in the valley three miles away under my feet, showing how uneven the earth may sometimes be, and making it seem an accident that it should ever be level and convenient for the feet of man…

(A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 189-200)

Channing notes:

  [Thoreau] sometimes went as far as homeliness; which again, even if there be a prejudice against it, shines out at times beyond a vulgar sense. Thus, he alludes those who pass the night on a steamer’s deck, and see the mountains in moonlight; and he did this himself once on the Hudson, at the prow, when, after a “hem” or two, the passenger who stood next inquired in good faith: “Come, now, can’t ye lend me a chaw o’ baccy?” He looked like a shipmate. It was on another Albany steamboat that he walked the deck hungrily, among the fine gentlemen and ladies, eating upon a half-loaf of bread, his dinner for the day, and very late.
(Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, 34)

Thoreau writes in his journal 5 July 1845:

  I lodged at the house of a saw-miller last summer, on the Caatskill Mountains, high up as Pine Orchard, in the blueberry and raspberry region, where the quiet and cleanliness and coolness seemed to be all one,—which had their ambrosial character. He was the miller of the Kaaterskill Falls. They were a clean and wholesome family, inside and out, like their house. The latter was not plastered, only lathed, and the inner doors were not hung. The house seemed high-placed, airy, and perfumed, fit to entertain a travelling god. It was so high, indeed, that all the music, the broken strains, the waifs and accompaniments of tunes, that swept over the ridge of the Caatskills, passed through its aisles.
(Journal, 1:361)
November 1843. New York, N.Y.

The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review publishes Thoreau’s review of The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men by John Adolphus Etzler, entitled “Paradise (To Be) Regained.”

November 1848.

“The Return Journey,” Thoreau’s final installment of “Ktaadn and the Maine Woods,” appears in Sartain’s Union Magazine.

Ktaadn 5
Ktaadn No. V in Sartain’s Union Magazine(The Thoreau Collection of Kevin Mac Donnell)
November 1849. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau surveys land on Lexington Road for Isaac Watts (A Catalog of Thoreau’s Surveys in the Concord Free Public Library, 12; Henry David Thoreau papers. Special Collections, Concord (Mass.) Free Public Library).

New Haven, Conn. The New Englander reviews the first and only issue of Æsthetic Papers and comments on Thoreau’s contribution:

  Of the odd things in the collection, the queerest is the Essay on Resistance to Civil Government by Mr. Thoreau, a man who refuses to pay all taxes and has been imprisoned in consequence, we know not how many times; but he writes straight on what he thinks, and it is no slight matter, to be able to know by actual inspection, that such a man as this breathes and lives in New England.
November 1854. Concord, Mass.

William Ellery Channing writes to Thoreau:

Dear T.,

  how would you like to go up to Holt’s point to-day, or will you . . .

Yrs

W. E. C.

(Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 167 (Spring 1984):3)
November 1855. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau continues surveying for the Mill Dam Company (A Catalog of Thoreau’s Surveys in the Concord Free Public Library, 9-10; Henry David Thoreau papers. Special Collections, Concord (Mass.) Free Public Library).

October 1841.

Thoreau’s poem “Friendship” appears in the sixth issue of the Dial (Dial (1961), 2:204-205).

October 1842.

Thoreau’s poems “The Black Knight,” “The Inward Morning,” “Free Love,” “The Poet’s Delay,” ““Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,” “The Moon,” “To the Maiden in the East,” and “Summer Rain” appear in the tenth issue of the Dial.

(Dial (1961), 3:180, 198-200, 222-224)

Return to the Log Index

Donation

$