CONCORD, March 23, 1848.
DEAR FRIEND,--Lidian says I must write a sentence about the children.
Eddy says he cannot sing,--"not till mother is a-going to be well." We
shall hear his voice very soon, in that case, I trust. Ellen is
already thinking what will be done when you come home; but then she
thinks it will be some loss that I shall go away. Edith says that I
shall come and see them, and always at tea-time, so that I can play
with her. Ellen thinks she likes father best because he jumps her
sometimes. This is the latest news from
Yours, etc., HENRY.
P. S.--I have received three newspapers from you duly which I have not
acknowledged. There is an anti-Sabbath convention held in Boston
to-day, to which Alcott has gone.
* * * * *
That friend to whom Thoreau wrote most constantly and fully, on all
topics, was Mr. Harrison Blake of Worcester, a graduate of Harvard two
years earlier than Thoreau, in the same class with two other young men
from Concord,--E. R. Hoar and H. B. Dennis. This circumstance may have
led to Mr. Blake's visiting the town occasionally, before his intimacy
with its poet-naturalist began, in the year 1848. At that time, as
Thoreau wrote to Horace Greeley, he had been supporting himself for
five years wholly by the labor of his hands; his Walden hermit life
was over, yet neither its record nor the first book had been
published, and Thoreau was known in literature chiefly by his papers
in the _Dial_, which had then ceased for four years. In March, 1848,
Mr. Blake read Thoreau's chapter on Persius in the _Dial_ for July,
1840,--and though he had read it before without being much impressed
by it, he now found in it "pure depth and solidity of thought." "It
has revived in me," he wrote to Thoreau, "a haunting impression of
you, which I carried away from some spoken words of yours.... When I
was last in Concord, you spoke of retiring farther from our
civilization. I asked you if you would feel no longings for the
society of your friends. Your reply was in substance, 'No, I am
nothing.' That reply was memorable to me. It indicated a depth of
resources, a completeness of renunciation, a poise and repose in the
universe, which to me is almost inconceivable; which in you seemed
domesticated, and to which I look up with veneration. I would know of
that soul which can say 'I am nothing.' I would be roused by its words
to a truer and purer life. Upon me seems to be dawning with new
significance the idea that God is here; that we have but to bow before
Him in profound submission at every moment, and He will fill our souls
with his presence. In this opening of the soul to God, all duties seem
to centre; what else have we to do?... If I understand rightly the
significance of your life, this is it: You would sunder yourself from
society, from the spell of institutions, customs, conventionalities,
that you may lead a fresh, simple life with God. Instead of breathing
a new life into the old forms, you would have a new life without and
within. There is something sublime to me in this attitude,--far as I
may be from it myself.... Speak to me in this hour as you are
prompted.... I honor you because you abstain from action, and open
your soul that you may _be_ somewhat. Amid a world of noisy, shallow
actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply _be_.' Could
I plant myself at once upon the truth, reducing my wants to their
minimum, ... I should at once be brought nearer to nature, nearer to
my fellow-men,--and life would be infinitely richer. But, alas! I
shiver on the brink."
Thus appealed to by one who had so well attained the true
Transcendental shibboleth,--"God working in us, both to will and to
do,"--Thoreau could not fail to make answer, as he did at once, and
thus:--