Note 85 — III FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS (continued 3)

Marston Watson, whose uncle, Edward Watson, with his nephews, owned the "breezy island" where Thoreau had visited his friends (Clark's Island, the only one in Plymouth Bay), had built his own house, "Hillside," on the slope of one of the hills above Plymouth town, and there laid out a fine park and garden, which Thoreau surveyed for him in the autumn of 1854, Alcott and Mr. Watson carrying the chain. For a description of Hillside, see Channing's Wanderer (Boston, 1871) and Alcott's Sonnets and Canzonets (Boston: Roberts, 1882). It was a villa much visited by Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Thoreau, George Bradford, and the Transcendentalists generally. Mr. Watson graduated at Harvard two years after Thoreau, and in an old diary says, "I remember Thoreau in the college yard (1836) with downcast thoughtful look intent, as if he were searching for something; always in a green coat,—green because the authorities required black, I suppose." In a letter he says: "I have always heard the 'Maiden in the East' was Mrs. Watson,—Mary Russell Watson,—and I suppose there is no doubt of it. I may be prejudiced, but I have always thought it one of his best things,—and I have highly valued his lines. I find in my Dial, No. 6, I have written six new stanzas in the margin of Friendship, and they are numbered to show how they should run. I think Mrs. Brown gave them to me."