CONCORD, Wednesday evening,
September 8, [1841.]
DEAR FRIEND,--Your note came wafted to my hand like the first leaf of
the fall on the September wind, and I put only another interpretation
upon its lines than upon the veins of those which are soon to be
strewed around me. It is nothing but Indian summer here at present. I
mean that any weather seems reserved expressly for our late purposes
whenever we happen to be fulfilling them. I do not know what right I
have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time
of my desert.
What with the crickets and the crowing of cocks, and the lowing of
kine, our Concord life is sonorous enough. Sometimes I hear the cock
bestir himself on his perch under my feet, and crow shrilly before
dawn; and I think I might have been born any year for all the
phenomena I know. We count sixteen eggs daily now, when arithmetic
will only fetch the hens up to thirteen; but the world is young, and
we wait to see this eccentricity complete its period.
My verses on Friendship are already printed in the _Dial_; not
expanded, but reduced to completeness by leaving out the long lines,
which always have, or should have, a longer or at least another sense
than short ones.
Just now I am in the mid-sea of verses, and they actually rustle
around me as the leaves would round the head of Autumnus himself
should he thrust it up through some vales which I know; but, alas!
many of them are but crisped and yellow leaves like his, I fear, and
will deserve no better fate than to make mould for new harvests. I see
the stanzas rise around me, verse upon verse, far and near, like the
mountains from Agiocochook, not all having a terrestrial existence as
yet, even as some of them may be clouds; but I fancy I see the gleam
of some Sebago Lake and Silver Cascade, at whose well I may drink one
day. I am as unfit for any practical purpose--I mean for the
furtherance of the world's ends--as gossamer for ship-timber; and I,
who am going to be a pencil-maker to-morrow,[16] can sympathize with
God Apollo, who served King Admetus for a while on earth. But I
believe he found it for his advantage at last,--as I am sure I shall,
though I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service.
Don't attach any undue seriousness to this threnody, for I love my
fate to the very core and rind, and could swallow it without paring
it, I think. You ask if I have written any more poems? Excepting those
which Vulcan is now forging, I have only discharged a few more bolts
into the horizon,--in all, three hundred verses--and sent them, as I
may say, over the mountains to Miss Fuller, who may have occasion to
remember the old rhyme:--
"Three scipen gode
Comen mid than flode
Three hundred cnihten."
But these are far more Vandalic than they. In this narrow sheet there
is not room even for one thought to root itself. But you must consider
this an odd leaf of a volume, and that volume
Your friend,
HENRY D. THOREAU.