Of Friendship, an Essay from a Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Of Friendship is an essay by Henry David Thoreau extracted from his first published book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which appeared in 1849. The essay sits as a long digression within the broader narrative of the river trip that Thoreau had taken with his brother John in 1839 and is one of the most ambitious treatments of friendship in nineteenth-century American literature.

The Week itself was Thoreau’s first major book. He had begun it as a tribute to his brother John, who had died of tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself shaving. The trip the two had taken three years earlier provided the framing structure, but Thoreau used the river journey as a hanging frame for substantial digressions on various subjects including poetry, friendship, religion, history, and the various reflections that the natural setting of the river suggested to him.

The friendship essay is one of the longer and more developed of these digressions. Thoreau handles friendship with the same combination of philosophical seriousness and personal feeling that he brought to all his major subjects. He distinguishes genuine friendship from the various more superficial relationships that pass for friendship in ordinary social life. He addresses the difficulty of maintaining genuine friendships across the various pressures of adult life. He treats the particular form of attachment that connects two people who recognize something in each other that no third person can quite see.

The essay clearly drew on Thoreau’s own experience of friendship with his brother John, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Bronson Alcott, with Margaret Fuller, and with the various other figures in the Concord Transcendentalist circle. The death of his brother John had given the question of friendship a particular weight for Thoreau and the essay is partly an attempt to think through what genuine friendship had meant in his own life.

The essay is one of the strongest passages in A Week and has often been extracted for separate publication or anthologized as one of the major nineteenth-century American treatments of friendship. It runs about thirty pages and pairs with the rest of A Week, with Emerson’s earlier essay on Friendship in his First Series of 1841, and with the broader Transcendentalist literature on personal relationships.