Footnote, with skaters

 A showoff, a Greek statue and stooped man went skating.

It’s not a joke — just a footnote on American literature.

Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne lived in the same village — Concord, Mass. — and knew each other. Hawthorne’s daughter Rose Lathrop left an account of the three writers skating on the river.

 

Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice‚ very remarkable, but very ugly, methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air. 

 

Lathrop thought her father would have liked to have been better friends with Thoreau. But Thoreau wasn’t much interested in Hawthorne’s writing.

Henry Seidel Canby says Thoreau read for knowledge and disliked fiction. Canby’s verdict:

 

There can be no other American man of letters who read so little American literature.

 

• Sources: The passage on the skaters is from Rose Lathrop’s “Memories of Hawthorne.” It’s quoted in Henry Seidel Canby’s Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 174. Canby’s note on Thoreau’s reading is on p. 188.