CONCORD, April 2, 1843.
DEAR RICHARD,--I was glad to receive a letter from you so bright and
cheery. You speak of not having made any conquests with your own spear
or quill as yet; but if you are tempering your spear-head during these
days, and fitting a straight and tough shaft thereto, will not that
suffice? We are more pleased to consider the hero in the forest
cutting cornel or ash for his spear, than marching in triumph with his
trophies. The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than
the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the
pleasantest prospects.
What you say about your studies furnishing you with a "mimic idiom"
only, reminds me that we shall all do well if we learn so much as to
talk,--to speak truth. The only fruit which even much living yields
seems to be often only some trivial success,--the ability to do some
slight thing better. We make conquest only of husks and shells for
the most part,--at least apparently,--but sometimes these are cinnamon
and spices, you know. Even the grown hunter you speak of slays a
thousand buffaloes, and brings off only their hides and tongues. What
immense sacrifices, what hecatombs and holocausts, the gods exact for
very slight favors! How much sincere life before we can even utter one
sincere word.
What I was learning in college was chiefly, I think, to express
myself, and I see now, that as the old orator prescribed, 1st, action;
2d, action; 3d, action; my teachers should have prescribed to me, 1st,
sincerity; 2d, sincerity; 3d, sincerity. The old mythology is
incomplete without a god or goddess of sincerity, on whose altars we
might offer up all the products of our farms, our workshops, and our
studies. It should be our Lar when we sit on the hearth, and our
Tutelar Genius when we walk abroad. This is the only panacea. I mean
sincerity in our dealings with ourselves mainly; any other is
comparatively easy. But I must stop before I get to 17thly. I believe
I have but one text and one sermon.
Your rural adventures beyond the West Cambridge hills have probably
lost nothing by distance of time or space. I used to hear only the
sough of the wind in the woods of Concord, when I was striving to give
my attention to a page of calculus. But, depend upon it, you will love
your native hills the better for being separated from them.
I expect to leave Concord, which is my Rome, and its people, who are
my Romans, in May, and go to New York, to be a tutor in Mr. William
Emerson's family. So I will bid you good-by till I see you or hear
from you again.
* * * * *
Going to Staten Island, early in May, 1843, Thoreau's first care was
to write to his "Romans, countrymen, and lovers by the banks of the
Musketaquid,"--beginning with his mother, his sisters, and Mrs.
Emerson. To Sophia and Mrs. E. he wrote May 22,--to Helen, with a few
touching verses on his brother John, the next day; and then he resumed
the correspondence with Emerson. It seems that one of his errands near
New York was to make the acquaintance of literary men and journalists
in the city, in order to find a vehicle for publication, such as his
neighbor Hawthorne had finally found in the pages of the _Democratic
Review_. For this purpose Thoreau made himself known to Henry James,
and other friends of Emerson, and to Horace Greeley, then in the first
freshness of his success with the _Tribune_,--a newspaper hardly more
than two years old then, but destined to a great career, in which
several of the early Transcendentalists took some part.