CONCORD, October 27, 1837.
DEAR HELEN,--Please you, let the defendant say a few words in defense
of his long silence. You know we have hardly done our own deeds,
thought our own thoughts, or lived our own lives hitherto. For a man
to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger
of losing all sense of responsibility or of self-respect. Now when
such a state of things exists, that the sacred opinions one advances
in argument are apologized for by his friends, before his face, lest
his hearers receive a wrong impression of the man,--when such gross
injustice is of frequent occurrence, where shall we look, and not look
in vain, for men, deeds, thoughts? As well apologize for the grape
that it is sour, or the thunder that it is noisy, or the lightning
that it tarries not.
Further, letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of
facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.
What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of
the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened
by a ray?
Your affectionate brother,
HENRY.
It is presumed the tender sister did not need a second lesson; and
equally that Henry did not see fit always to write such letters as he
praised above,--for he was quite ready to give his correspondents
facts, no less than thoughts, especially in his family letters.
Next to this epistle, chronologically, comes one in the conventional
dialect of the American Indian, as handed down by travelers and
romancers, by Jefferson, Chateaubriand, Lewis, Clarke, and Fenimore
Cooper. John Thoreau, Henry's brother, was born in 1815 and died
January 11, 1842. He was teaching at Taunton in 1837.