In 1839, while teaching school together, Henry and John Thoreau made a boat trip down the Concord River and up the Merrimack as far as Hooksett, New Hampshire, from there continuing by land to Concord and Plymouth, New Hampshire. This journey later provided the raw material for Thoreau's first published work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (published in 1849). Also during the period when they were teaching colleagues, Henry and John fell in love with the same girl, Ellen Sewall of Scituate, older sister of their pupil Edmund Sewall. Both proposed marriage — John in July of 1840, Henry later that year. Neither won Ellen's hand. Ellen later married the Reverend Joseph Osgood. None of John and Cynthia Thoreau's four children ever married. Although he did not marry, Henry valued the friendship and mutual respect of several women — Lidian Emerson (the wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson), Lucy Jackson Brown (Mrs. Emerson's sister), and Mary Moody Emerson (Emerson's strong-minded, forthright, and eccentric aunt).
Having closed his Concord Academy, Thoreau accepted an invitation to move into the Emerson household as a live-in handyman. He stayed with the Emersons from 1841 to 1843. Emerson, fourteen years older than Thoreau, had moved to Concord in 1834, while Thoreau was a student at Harvard. After Thoreau's graduation from Harvard and his return to Concord in 1837, a close bond had developed between the two. Because Emerson was older, published, and already a leader among Transcendental thinkers, he filled the roles of teacher and patron as well as friend to Thoreau. As time went on, the master/pupil aspect of the relationship became less appropriate and less satisfactory. But in the early 1840s, it suited both men.
Under Emerson's influence, Thoreau increasingly turned his thoughts to writing. While living in the Emerson home, he enjoyed the benefits of Emerson's encouragement, support, and advice. He also benefited from access to Emerson's library, which included important works of Oriental literature of great interest to Thoreau, books not readily available elsewhere. Members of the Transcendental Club came to Concord to converse with Emerson, and Thoreau was welcome among them. Thoreau contributed to The Dial during this period, and edited the April 1843 issue for Emerson, who became editor of the periodical after Margaret Fuller's resignation in 1842. Thoreau and Emerson also shared the common bond of grief from January of 1842, when Thoreau's brother John died of lockjaw and Emerson's first child Waldo died of scarlet fever.
