MR. ALCOTT,--I remember that, in the spring, you invited me to visit
you. I feel inclined to spend a day or two with you and on your hills
at this season, returning, perhaps, by way of Brattleboro. What if I
should take the cars for Walpole next Friday morning? Are you at home?
And will it be convenient and agreeable to you to see me then? I will
await an answer.
I am but poor company, and it will not be worth the while to put
yourself out on my account; yet from time to time I have some thoughts
which would be the better for an airing. I also wish to get some hints
from September on the Connecticut to help me understand that season on
the Concord; to snuff the musty fragrance of the decaying year in the
primitive woods. There is considerable cellar-room in my nature for
such stores; a whole row of bins waiting to be filled, before I can
celebrate my Thanksgiving. Mould is the richest of soils, yet _I_ am
not mould. It will always be found that one flourishing institution
exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is
parasitic to this extent.
Your fellow-traveler,
HENRY D. THOREAU.
As fortune would have it, Mr. Alcott was then making his arrangements
for a conversational tour in the vicinity of New York; but he renewed
the invitation for himself, while repeating it in the name of Mrs.
Alcott and his daughters. Thoreau made the visit, I believe, and some
weeks later, at the suggestion of Mr. Alcott, he was asked by Marcus
Spring of New York to give lectures and survey their estate for a
community at Perth Amboy, N. J., in which Mr. Spring and his friends,
the Birneys, Welds, Grimkés, etc., had united for social and
educational purposes. It was a colony of radical opinions and
old-fashioned culture; the Grimkés having been bred in Charleston, S.
C., which they left by reason of their opposition to negro slavery,
and the elder Birney having held slaves in Alabama until his
conscience bade him emancipate them, after which he, too, could have
no secure home among slaveholders. He was the first presidential
candidate of the voting Abolitionists, as Lincoln was the last; and
his friend, Theodore Weld, who married Miss Grimké, had been one of
the early apostles of emancipation in Ohio. Their circle at Eagleswood
appealed to Thoreau's sense of humor, and is described by him in a
letter soon to be given.
* * * * *
In June, 1856, Thoreau made a long visit at Brooklawn. In August, Mr.
Ricketson, who had proposed a summer visit to Concord, found himself
prevented by feeble health, and received the two following letters
from Thoreau:--