Thoreau begins "Wednesday" by contrasting roads (which "do some violence to Nature, and bring the traveller to stare at her") with the river (which "steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion," creating and forming a part of the landscape, as well as providing an approach to it). In passing Indian burial sites, he revisits the subjects of death and rejuvenation. He comments on how "time is slowly crumbling the bones of a race." As the bones decay and become one with the earth, they fertilize the soil used to grow crops for the white man. Ever alert to microcosms of the universal, Thoreau returns to the theme of nature's enveloping scope in comparing even the smallest stream to a "mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land." Thoreau describes the boats he viewed from Staten Island (where he lived in 1843). Through their great number and in the changing light of the day, these vessels lose their particularity and become increasingly generic. He attributes Arcadian and Oriental qualities to simple New England dwellings on the river, imagining the quiet, unhurried, pastoral life of their residents, and the mistress of one as "some Yankee-Hindoo woman."
At Manchester, the travelers approach the Amoskeag Falls, where they observe basins worn into rock by the falling water. Whereas the Native Americans understood that such basins were natural formations, members of the Royal Society described them in the eighteenth century as artificial. The Indian's native intuition is clearly portrayed as superior to the so-called knowledge of civilized man. Such natural formations, Thoreau writes, along with lichens, rocks, and other details of nature, form the antiquities of America, the stuff of our history. Unlike the remains of man-made objects, they do not return to dust. But nature incorporates evidence of past human life as well. Thoreau criticizes the distinction made by men and reflected in the practice of both religion and medicine, which regard matter as independent of spirit, and he asserts the inseparability of the physical and the spiritual in human life. As the brothers progress through New Hampshire from Manchester to Goffstown, Thoreau launches into the lengthy, idealistic, lyrical consideration of friendship that is central to the book. He reveals that his brother John is the friend of whom he writes in the moving passage, "My Friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother." It is clear in this chapter that A Week represents Thoreau's attempt to work through his grief over John's death. Thoreau accepts that John has, in some way, been translated into nature and the eternal, and, moreover, that he will live in the spirit of those who cared for him. Thoreau writes affirmatively, "Even the death of Friends will inspire in us as much as their lives." The travelers camp in Hooksett. Thoreau considers the permanence of universal laws; the awakening within us, in serene moments, of all the eras of history; the world as "canvass to our imaginations"; the life of the mind, which craves expression; the fragility of human enterprise and aspiration; and the difficulty of achieving inner life in the normal course of human existence. The chapter closes with Thoreau's dream of a friend with whom he had had a "difference," which is resolved through the dream.
