Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/309

 2ET.37.] THOREAU AND CHOLMONDELEY. 285

August, 1854, and soon after went to Concord, where, at the suggestion of Emerson, he became an inmate of Mrs. Thoreau s family. This made him intimate with Henry Thoreau for a month or two, and also brought him into acquaintance with Ellery Charming, then living across the main street of Concord, in the west end of the village, and furnishing to Thoreau a landing- place for his boat under the willows at the foot of Channing s small garden. Alcott was not then in Concord, but Cholmondeley made his acquaintance in Boston, and admired his charac ter and manners. 1

With Channing and Thoreau the young Eng lishman visited their nearest mountain, Wachu- sett, and in some of their walks the artist Rowse, who made the first portrait of Thoreau, joined, for he was then in Concord, late in 1854, en graving the fine head of Daniel Webster from a painting by Ames, and this engraving he gave both to Thoreau and to Cholmondeley. In De cember the Englishman, whose patriotism was

1 See Memoir of Bronson Alcott, pp. 485-494. The remark of Emerson quoted on p. 486, that Cholmondeley was &quot;the son of a Shropshire squire,&quot; was not strictly correct, his father being a Cheshire clergyman of a younger branch of the an cient race of Cholmondeley. But he was the grandson of a Shropshire squire (owner of land), for his mother was daugh ter and sister of such gentlemen, and it was her brother Rich ard who presented Reginald Heber and Charles Cholmondeley to the living of Hodnet, near Market Drayton.