I hope to hear occasionally of your doings and those of your compeers
in your classic plowings and diggings.
TO HENRY D. THOREAU,
Concord Woods.
Thoreau's letters to Lane have not come into any editor's hands. In
England, before Lane's discovery by Alcott, in 1842, he had been the
editor of the _Mark-Lane Gazette_ (or something similar), which gave
the price-current of wheat, etc., in the English markets. Emerson
found him in Hampstead, London, in February, 1848, and wrote to
Thoreau: "I went last Sunday, for the first time, to see Lane at
Hampstead, and dined with him. He was full of friendliness and
hospitality; has a school of sixteen children, one lady as matron,
then Oldham. That is all the household. They looked just comfortable."
"Lane instructed me to ask you to forward his _Dials_ to him, which
must be done, if you can find them. Three bound volumes are among his
books in my library. The fourth volume is in unbound numbers at J.
Munroe & Co.'s shop, received there in a parcel to my address, a day
or two before I sailed, and which I forgot to carry to Concord. It
must be claimed without delay. It is certainly there,--was opened by
me and left; and they can inclose all four volumes to Chapman for me."
This would indicate that he had not lost interest in the days and
events of his American sojourn,--unpleasant as some of these must have
been to the methodical, prosaic Englishman.
While at Walden, Thoreau wrote but few letters; there is, however, a
brief correspondence with Mr. J. E. Cabot, then an active naturalist,
coöperating with Agassiz in his work on the American fishes, who had
requested Thoreau to procure certain species from Concord. The letters
were written from the cabin at Walden, and it is this same structure
that figures in the letters from Thoreau to Emerson in England, as the
proposed nucleus of the cottage of poor Hugh the gardener, before he
ran away from Concord, as there narrated, on a subsequent page. The
first sending of river-fish was in the end of April, 1847. Then
followed this letter:--