I improve the occasion of my mother's sending to acknowledge the
receipt of your stirring letter. You have probably received mine by
this time. I thank you for not anticipating any vulgar objections on
my part. _Far_ travel, very _far_ travel, or travail, comes near to
the worth of staying at home. Who knows whence his education is to
come! Perhaps I may drag my anchor at length, or rather, when the
_winds_ which blow _over_ the deep fill my sails, may stand away for
distant parts,--for now I seem to have a firm _ground_ anchorage,
though the harbor is low-shored enough, and the traffic with the
natives inconsiderable. I may be away to Singapore by the next tide.
I like well the ring of your last maxim, "It is only the fear of death
makes us reason of impossibilities." And but for fear, death itself is
an impossibility.
Believe me, I can hardly let it end so. If you do not go soon, let me
hear from you again.
Yrs. in great haste,
HENRY D. THOREAU.
Hecker did not in fact go to Europe till a year later, and when he
walked over a part of central Europe, it was in company with one or
two young Catholic priests,--men very unlike Thoreau.
The short correspondence with Calvin Greene (longer than that with
Hecker) occurred at intervals, a dozen years and more after the
Fruitlands period, when the Walden experience had been lived through
and recorded, and the friendship with the Ricketson family was in its
earlier stages. Mr. Greene, when he called on me at his first visit to
the Thoreau family in 1863, mentioned that he had just read Thoreau's
poem, "The Departure," which at Sophia's request I had lately printed
in the Boston _Commonwealth_, a weekly that I had been editing since
Moncure Conway had left Concord for London, in the winter of 1862-63.
Greene was a plain, sincere man, never in New England before, who
amused Channing by saying he had "taken a boat-ride on the Atlantic."
He came once more in 1874, and spent an evening with me in the house
where Thoreau lived and died,--Mrs. Thoreau then being dead, and
Sophia at Bangor, where she died in 1876.