Thoreau made glorious stabs at verse, near-misses. It took an Emily Dickinson to transfix the Transcendental Idea with the hard small shot of her poetry. But how alike are some of their images! Compare Emily's
Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music—
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—
with Henry Thoreau's
The air over these fields is a foundry full of moulds
for casting bluebirds' warbles.
Mary jumped. "What?" Someone was standing behind her. It was the big man from the reference room. Had he been reading over her shoulder? What was the big idea?
He stuck out a drawer from the card catalogue and pointed to a card. Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, by Channing. "Where is it?"
He might have said please. Mary gave him her big kindly smile and pointed him in the right direction.
A moment later he was back. "Not there."
"Perhaps Miss Herpitude can help you," said Mary, wishing he would go away. Then she repented. How could he know it was her day off? "Do you know Jetsom's new book?" she said.
"Jetsom? Which Jetsom?"
Which Jetsom? Why didn't he look it up? Mary looked at her typewriter. "F.A. Jetsom," she said carefully.
He went out, but a moment later he was back, looking at her suspiciously. "You mean R.F. Jetsom, don't you? Ralph Framingham Jetsom, Thoreau at Harvard?"
"No," said Mary. "I mean that other Jetsom. F for Flotsam, A for And." She banged out a sentence of gibberish on her typewriter, then looked up to find him still there. She put her glasses on. "It's my day off," she said humbly.
'She was like a big untidy flower, the man decided, one of those red and white striped carnations named after Mrs. Jocelyn Pope Hopewell or Mrs. Eisenhower Roosevelt Jones, or a sort of bouquet with a couple of fringed gentians in the middle, whatever a fringed gentian looked like, but probably like those black eyelashes hanging down like tassels over those blue eyes. "The eye is the jewel of the body," he murmured to himself, quoting Henry Thoreau.
"What's that?" said Mary. Some insult, no doubt.
"I said, all right for you." He turned on his heel and went out of the room.
Mary took the pickle out of her lunchbag and took a bite. She was surprised to find that what was shaping up in her mind was that tiresome triumphal arch again. It was part of the baggage that followed her around. There it was, with all its gear, the colossal cornice and the coffered barrel vaults and the channeled pilasters and the gesturing statuary and the streaked marble columns. And through the opening that same tedious procession was passing, splendid with banners and horns and horsemen in red and blue and gold. What was it for? Who were they? Where were they going? The man on the biggest horse, the one who was looking at her, had a face now, the face of the man with the basso profundo voice. Hey, get out of there. That's my private triumphal arch, my private horses and horns and my red and blue outfits. Go away.
*2*
I have travelled a good deal In Concord. —Henry Thoreau
Outside it was March. Mary stood on the steps of the library looking up. A noisy flock of grackles had filled the elm trees like a convention of Shriners using up all the available hotels. The sky was blowing away like a silk scarf caught in the branches. High up in the blue air there was another flock of grackles, hovering over the shining ragged Y of the junction of the swollen rivers and over Walden Pond and over the hills named by the Indians—Punkatasset, Nashawtuc, Annursnac—and over the glistening dotted swamps and over the brown haze of elms and maples and buttonwoods that obscured the veering arrowheads of Concord's streets. The flock opened out, then collapsed and thickened and began to descend, wheeling over the bronze Minuteman at the North Bridge, flapping down on the rooftops of the Milldam stores that were slung sway-backed between their chimneys, screeching at each other from the gigantic white Woolworth false-front with its pseudo-Colonial urns, fluttering to the sidewalk momentarily between the Greek columns of the old bank building, then tossed up again like a blanket shaken out by a housewife to circle around the white belltower of the First Parish Church, banking sharply in alarm at the cracking of the tall-masted flag on the traffic island, and coming to rest at last for a screaming committee meeting on the Old Hill Burying Ground at the end of the street. Below the graveyard lay the Milldam with its stores, and Monument Square with its Civil War Memorial obelisk and its little temples devoted to Christian Science, the Knights of Columbus, the Masons and the Middlesex Fire Insurance Company. Running away out of sight were the tree-lined streets with their old wooden houses—to the southeast the simple ones with the small windows, and Emerson's place and the Alcotts' Orchard House and Hawthorne's Wayside and the Antiquarian Museum, and to the west beyond the Milldam on Main Street the bigger, finer houses with their broad flat pilasters and imposing doorways and their back yards sloping down to the river.
Mary walked down the library steps and started home, thinking about the movies. In the movies, when there was something energetic going on, the background music was "The Ride of the Valkyries." Or if there was something sad, they played sad music, exalting the action into poetry, so that you turned with tear-filled eyes to your neighbor, whispering, beautiful, isn't it. That was what living in Concord was like—the movies. Only instead of music you had historical association, or something pungent that Waldo or Henry had said. And if you were cursed with a photographic memory you couldn't even walk down the street without the drums and fifes starting up, or the transcendental jukebox. Here was the Milldam. In Thoreau's day the mill had already been long gone, replaced by a row of stores. Henry had called it Concord's Rialto. There by the bank had been one of the blockhouses during King Philip's War. Beside the bus stop was the place where old Simon Willard and Peter Bulkeley had bought the original six miles square from Squaw Sachem and the Indians of Musketaquid in an atmosphere of peace and concord in 1636. You couldn't cross the square without remembering that Emerson never crossed it without feeling a wild poetic delight, you couldn't look at the Catholic church without thinking of its start in life as a home for the Universalists, and of the handsome invitation they had issued to everybody in favor of the universal salvation of all mankind to meet at Bigelow's tavern to choose officers. You couldn't even glance down Monument Street without thinking of the red backs of the British Regulars filing down it on their way to the North Bridge and the beginning of all that important trouble in 1775. That April day had been the first occasion when history had shone her spotlight on Concord, when a scattering of balls from a few fowling pieces and Brown Bess muskets had left a hole in the fabric of things-as-they-were that wasn't to be sewn up again. Then in the forties and fifties history had aimed her burning glass at Concord again, and in simple houses noble as Doric temples there had flamed up a kind of rural American Athens, with Margaret Fuller for a visiting oracle, Emerson and Thoreau and Alcott for philosophers and Nathaniel Hawthorne for a weird kind of Sophocles. And so important to the general blaze of utterance had been each particular pond or wood lot or boulder field that Emerson had make a joke, once, about the poor blockheads who were not born in Concord, but had to do the best they could, considering they had never seen Bateman's Pond or Nine Acre Corner or Becky Stow's swamp.
The next generation had sugared down into a Louisa May Alcott, no Transcendentalist, and after that Concord had been content to live in the shadow. But it was still a lively and ravishing suburban town. Mary would never have said as much out loud, but she felt herself walking on holy ground.