Chapter C: T. Jackson takes the Quarterly (new one), and will lend it to us (9)

[95] This is the excursion described by Thoreau in a subsequent letter,--lasting six days, and the first that Channing had made which involved "camping out." It was also Thoreau's last visit to this favorite mountain; but Channing continued to go there after the death of his friend; and some of these visits are recorded in his poem "The Wanderer." The last one was in September, 1869, when I accompanied him, and we again spent five nights on the plateau where he had camped with Thoreau. At that time, one of the "two good spruce houses, half a mile apart," mentioned by Thoreau, was still standing, in ruins,--the place called by Channing "Henry's Camp," and thus described:--

We built our fortress where you see
Yon group of spruce-trees, sidewise on the line
Where the horizon to the eastward bounds,--
A point selected by sagacious art,
Where all at once we viewed the Vermont hills,
And the long outline of the mountain-ridge,
Ever renewing, changeful every hour.

See _The Wanderer_ (Boston, 1871), p. 61.

[96] See Thoreau's _Journal_, Dec. 3, 1859. Merriam mentioned Thoreau's name to him, but never guessed who his companion was.

[97] This was Thoreau's last visit to Monadnock, and the one mentioned in the note of August 3, and in Channing's _Wanderer_.

[98] The Prince of Wales (now King Edward VII), then visiting America with the Duke of Newcastle.

[99] Now termed pneumonia.

[100] In April, 1859, Mr. Alcott was chosen superintendent of the public schools of Concord, by a school committee of which Mr. Bull, the creator of the Concord grape, and Mr. Sanborn, were members, and for some years he directed the studies of the younger pupils, to their great benefit and delight. At the yearly "exhibitions," songs were sung composed by Louisa Alcott and others, and the whole town assembled to see and hear. The stress of civil war gradually checked this idyllic movement, and Mr. Alcott returned to his garden and library. It was two years after this that Miss Alcott had her severe experience as hospital nurse at Washington.

[101] Edwin Morton of Plymouth, Mass., a friend of John Brown and Gerrit Smith, who went to England in October, 1859, to avoid testifying against his friends.

[102] A word may be said of the after life of this magnanimous Englishman, who did not long survive his Concord correspondent. In March, 1863, being then in command of a battalion of Shropshire Volunteers, which he had raised, he inherited Condover Hall and the large estate adjacent, and took the name of Owen as a condition of the inheritance. A year later he married Miss Victoria Cotes, daughter of John and Lady Louisa Cotes (Co. Salop), a godchild of the Queen, and went to Italy for his wedding tour. In Florence he was seized with a malignant fever, April 10, 1864, and died there April 20,--not quite two years after Thoreau's death. His brother Reginald, who had met him in Florence, carried back his remains to England, and he is buried in Condover churchyard. Writing to an American friend, Mr. R. Cholmondeley said: "The whole county mourned for one who had made himself greatly beloved. During his illness his thoughts went back very much to America and her great sufferings. His large heart felt for your country as if it were his own." It seems that he did not go to New Zealand with the "Canterbury Pilgrims," as suggested in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (December, 1893), but in the first of Lord Lyttelton's ships (the Charlotte Jane), having joined in Lord L.'s scheme for colonizing the island, where he remained only six months, near Christchurch.

[103] Rev. Joseph May, a cousin of Louisa Alcott.

[104] I had answered T. Cholmondeley's last letter, explaining that Thoreau was ill and absent.

[105] A return to religious Quakerism, of which his friend had written enthusiastically.

[106] This was a short-lived monthly, edited at Cincinnati (1861-62) by Moncure D. Conway, since distinguished as an author, who had resided for a time in Concord, after leaving his native Virginia. He wrote asking Thoreau and all his Concord friends to contribute to this new _Dial_, and several of them did so.