The Story of an Old Book

My wife and I spent our honeymoon, in July 1982, exploring the peninsulas in the part of coastal Maine that Sarah Orne Jewett celebrated with delicate art in her book The Country of the Pointed Firs. One day, as we followed the peninsula that begins near Spruce Head down to its termination in the North Atlantic, a causeway over an inlet of that ocean came into view. On the right side of the road, just before the causeway, was a two-story shack clinging to the steep bank that led down to the water. A sign over the entrance to the shack said USED BOOKS. We stopped to see what so improbably located a second hand bookstore had to offer.

On the upper floor, dog-eared mouldiness. On the lower floor, reached by a desperate staircase that planted its feet in twilight gloom, was a table, and on the table was an elegantly bound book, its appearance making it seem as out of place as the bookstore seemed out of place in its own way. I paid $10 for it.

The book was an 1821 edition of the works of the Roman poet Vergil, one of the titles in the series known as the Delphine classics. One of my classics professors had told me about this series, but I had never seen any of the volumes in it. The books were prepared at the order of King Louis XIV of France for his son the Dauphin (Delphinus in Latin), who was, unfortunately, decidedly unbookish. The Delphine classics did not incorporate any advances in scholarship, but they were innovative pedagogically. In the margin on each page is a prose paraphrase, in simple Latin, of the original text printed on that page. The footnotes are also in Latin. The series became popular with serious students of the classics and it was republished numerous times. John Dryden produced his famous translation (1697) of Vergil working from a Delphine edition.

The series was published in America with minor changes by the firm of H. Carey and I. Lea of Philadelphia. H(enry) Carey was a son of the firm’s founder, Matthew Carey, one of whose agents, Mason “Parson” Weems, was the author of popular biographies of the revolutionary war hero Francis Marion and of George Washington; it was in Weems’ biography of Washington that Americans first read the story of the vandalized cherry tree. The Careys, father and son, catered to the taste of wealthy Virginians for elegantly made books with fine bindings. The Delphine Vergil that I now owned would have pleased any fastidious Virginian. Van Wyck Brooks wrote about the Careys in the first chapter of his charming study The World of Washington Irving.

The title page of the book was inscribed with the signature “David G. Haskins 1830”. From time to time, in the years before the Internet arrived with its answers to all riddles, I wondered who David G. Haskins had been and what sort of person he was. A Harvard graduate, probably. I wondered if he liked Vergil as much as I do; the pages of the book are unmarked and unworn. But maybe he was simply careful with books. And then I stopped wondering about him.

That is, until recently, when I read in Robert Richardson’s excellent study, Emerson: the Mind on Fire, that in 1839, Emerson had had a long discussion about religion with David Haskins, “a relative.” Of course; Emerson’s mother was Ruth Haskins. But how close a relative? Walter Harding, in his book “The Days of Henry David Thoreau”, mentions an acquaintance of Thoreau named David Haskins who was Emerson’s “cousin”.

Very good — a David Haskins was a close relative of Emerson. But was this David Haskins the same person as the long-ago owner of the Delphine Vergil that I bought in Maine?

My brother-in-law Kevin McLaughlin, an accomplished amateur historian, suggested that I look for information about David Haskins in the Find-a-Grave web site. I did, and found an entry about a David Haskins who was related to Emerson and even better, the entry contained a sample of his handwriting. The sample matched the inscription on the Delphine Vergil that I bought in Maine. Q. E. hot damn D.!

The Find-a-Grave entry includes an obituary of David Haskins which says, among other things, that he was a Havard classmate (’37) of Henry David Thoreau. This set to me to wondering — would Thoreau ever have borrowed this book from Haskins? Thoreau himself could not have afforded a Delphine edition. But he loved Vergil’s Georgics, a poem about farming and the world of nature, which many consider Vergil’s most technically finished work. More than one critic has suggested that Thoreau learned how to write about nature from Vergil’s lovingly detailed descriptions of how to raise field crops, how to tend vines, how to raise cattle, and how to keep bees. Could he have held this book in this hands just as I have been holding it, off and on, for 40 years?

I recently called the Concord Free Public Library to ask anyone there if the library would accept David Haskin’s Delphine Vergil as a donation. The answer was yes. So when the weather clears, my wife and I will drive to Concord to deliver the book up to people who know how to care for it better than it has been cared for in the last 200 years.

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March 11, 2026 was a btight sunny early spring day. We delivered David Haskins’ Delphine Vergil to the staff of the special collections department of the Concord Free Public Library, who accepted it most graciously. One librarian brought out a box that contained the handwritten manuscripts of Emerson’s essay “Culture” and Thoreau’s great essay “Walking”. I touched both, with the hand that is writing this! Another pointed out to me the glass case containing Thoreau’s surveying equipment.

Ave atque Vale, Vergili, in domo sua nova.