Thus, in addition to talking about family life, visits, play, chores, and social activities, Edmund describes going with his family to lectures on elocution and astronomy. He writes of hearing his cousin Rev. Samuel J. May speak on common schools. These events reflected the popularity both of the American lyceum movement and reform activities in Massachusetts.
The journals also record a considerable amount of reading. Edmund borrowed some books on his own from the Sabbath School library or family friends when the Sewalls did not own them. Some books were read aloud in the Sewall family circle. Among the authors read were Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle. Like attendance at lectures, reading seems to have been an important part of the broad educational climate provided for Edmund.
Perhaps worst were the severe headaches and seizures that finally led him to undergo an operation to remove a piece of bone from his skull in The procedure was unusual enough that George Hayward, the surgeon who performed it, wrote an account of it for the Boston Medical Journal. How thankful we ought to be to God for his great mercy! We know little about the doings of the Sewall family during this period. They lasted an hour and a half….
I think it was no evidence that the Operation failed. The doctor forewarned me that I might have one or two such turns. By the time he began the second volume of his journal Edmund had left the district school and was attending the high school in Scituate.
In that term the school was kept by Nathaniel Holmes Morison and Edmund attended this school for the next four years. The schoolmaster was frequently present in the Sewall home as well during that period. Edmund describes Morison visiting the Sewalls, lending them books, inviting Ellen to a ball, giving lectures on astronomy, and showing Ellen and Edmund Mars and Jupiter in the nighttime sky.
It was on this visit that Edmund drew the attention of Henry Thoreau. The day the Sewalls left Concord, Thoreau wrote in his journal:. I have within the last few days come into contact with a pure uncompromising spirit, that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. Some persons carry about them the air and conviction of virtue, though they themselves are unconscious of it—and are even backward to appreciate it in others.
Such it is impossible not to love—still is their loveliness, as it were, independent of them, so that you seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near it is like an invisible presence which attends you. We see so much only as we possess. Edmund finished filling his second journal on June 26, , shortly after his return from Concord, and he began his third journal the following day. The briefest of the four, this journal covers a period of a little more than three months, ending October 4.
In it we see Edmund cultivating a knack for narrating amusing stories, as when he and his younger brother lost a pair of scissors while gathering a basket of flowers and then while searching for it lost the basket. Edmund barely mentions the event from this period that would later draw so much attention. From July 20 to August 2 Ellen visited Concord. At the end of September, shortly after their return, John came to Scituate.
At the time of this visit, Sewall and his wife Caroline were out of town. You do not know how much pleasure Mr. Frances Chamberlin was with us the night he arrived. He mistook the name. Sarah Otis came the day he went from here and has been here ever since, and will continue to make this her home till mother and father return. She would have come the day John was here if I had needed any assistance but I thought it would be so much pleasanter not to have a stranger with us when he was here that I did not ask her to stop when she called.
He gave us a very interesting account of his jaunt to the White Mountains. What a delightful time they must have had.
Should not you have liked to have gone? Edmund does not mention this visit in his journal, which ends about this time. He did not begin another one until after his arrival in Concord more than six months later to attend the school being conducted by the Thoreau brothers while living in the Thoreau household.
Horace Hosmer, who attended the academy during the summer term, identified Charles as Charles Henry Cummings. Keyes was a member of a Concord family and therefore not likely to be boarding with the Thoreaus. In the Thoreau family Edmund found a crowded household. Heads of households were listed by name in the census, with other persons enumerated by only gender, race, and age range. However, on the basis of other evidence it is possible to identify seven of the individuals by name.
These were likely servants, possibly two of the twenty-three African Americans listed as residents of Concord in the census. They were no longer in the Thoreau household by October. In his biography of Thoreau, Henry Seidel Canby noted that:. In the first entry alone Edmund describes a snowball fight, a pudding knocked out of a window, a fall that damaged a chair, and a bottle of ink spilled on a tablecloth. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that on April 8, , Henry wrote:.
How shall I help myself? By withdrawing into the garret, and associating with spiders and mice—determining to meet myself face to face sooner or later…. He was several years out of college but seemingly with no real plan for a profession. He had had difficulties finding work as a teacher, and it is not clear that he actually enjoyed teaching. He never mixed with the schoolboys; he was hated. The bell tolled instead of rang, when he taught alone There are reports that Henry was the butt of some boyhood jokes.
One day, when John was away, one of the boys cut the school bell rope and another rang the bell from the belfry as Henry walked from his house to the school. A picture of a booby in an almanack that year, resembled him so much that it was cut out, and shown round among his scholars as a likeness! In a letter to his father written a few weeks after his arrival in Concord, Edmund described his studies:.
In the morning I recite Solid Geometry. I draw the figures and write down the demonstration on the slate after Mr. Henry has taken the book and when I have done carry it to him.
He examines it to see that it is right. Geography comes next, immediately after recess. I borrow it of one of the boys who has done studying it. Grammar comes next. I have been through the first part and have begun the second. I borrow it of Mr. In the afternoon I am exclusively under Mr. I recite in Algebra and Latin generally before recess. In the afternoon Mr. In Latin I am in company with Miss Hine.
We are now on the life of Alcibiades in Nepos and in the exceptions in conjugation in the grammar. Geography is studied by a good many. We draw maps of the states. Saturday morning is devoted to writing composition. The two that I have written have been on birds and berries. Like Scituate, Concord offered numerous opportunities for education and self-improvement. While living with the Thoreaus, Edmund regularly attended church typically both morning and afternoon services as well as Sabbath school.
Edmund, the son of a minister, routinely recorded the Bible verses upon which the sermons were based. Lectures were an important part of the social fabric in many nineteenth-century New England towns. The Concord Lyceum, founded in , sponsored an annual season of lectures. On April 2, Edmund attended an antislavery lecture by Rev. The environs of Concord also offered ample opportunities for learning about history.
Reminders of the past seemed to be everywhere. He was shown a seventeenth-century weather vane from an early meetinghouse and the cemetery where victims of a outbreak of smallpox were buried. On a walk with John, Edmund looked for arrowheads and was given a part of an Indian implement. But some of the most significant educational opportunities for Edmund resulted from the many outdoor activities described in his journals, generally occurring in the afternoons after school or on Saturdays.
Almost daily, Edmund and some of the other boys explored the Concord area with the Thoreaus and particularly John. John was strongly interested in nature and particularly ornithology, assigning his students to write essays on birds and fish.
On walks, John frequently shot birds in order to examine them. On one occasion, Edmund reported the differences in the accounts of the hermit thrush in three books on ornithology, no doubt repeating what John had told him. She gave him the blank book for his journal, and also shared her interest in botany, taking Edmund for walks to look for early spring flowers.
Although Edmund wrote shortly after he arrived on March 23 that he would be with the Thoreaus for three months with the next term beginning June 25 , his Concord journal ends abruptly on May We do know that his sister Ellen arrived in Concord for a visit with the Wards sometime in June.
She accepted, but when her parents learned what had happened, they insisted she end the engagement and sent her to stay with her uncle Henry Devereux Sewall and his family in Watertown, New York.
She was in Watertown when Henry wrote to her with his own proposal, probably in early November. I wrote to H. 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. Edmund entered Harvard in , graduating in He soon began working for railroads and his career took him to a dozen states, Canada, and Honduras.
In he married Louisa Kilham Lovett and the couple had seven children. Joseph O. Osgood and the Osgoods had eight children. George W. Edmund seems to have been uncomfortable about the poem, writing in later life:. As to the verses, I enclose them as we received them from my sister Ellen, long ago.
We have always understood this to be the original , and in H. Mr Blake [54] wd doubtless recognize the handwriting, if H. Doubtless H. If Ellen was right in supposing me the boy , H. The one personal anecdote he shared is capped with a comment of disapproval. Wishing to be quite fair, I will tell you the one characteristic thing I do distinctly remember his saying to me. It is not in the diary—probably was said after that ended. The Unitarians believed that the miracles worked by Jesus Christ were evidence of his divinity.
But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
In the end, although Edmund grudgingly granted his daughter permission to publish an article based on his journals—provided his name was not mentioned—she never proceeded with her planned project. And that is probably how he wanted it. As Edmund insisted to his daughter:. I have just looked over the diary at Concord. What is transcendentalism.
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