The Thoreau
Institute at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's Life &
Writings: Correspondence
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HDT to Mrs. Lucy
Brown
Concord, Wednesday Evening, 8 September [1841]
Dear
Friend,—
Your note came wafted to my hand, like the
first leaf of the Fall on the September wind, and I put only another
interpretation upon its lines, than upon the veins of those which
are soon to be strewed around me.
It is nothing but Indian Summer here at present. I mean that
any weather seems reserved expressly for our late purposes whenever
we happen to be fulfilling them. I do not know what right I have to so much happiness, but
rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert.
What with the crickets and the crowing of
cocks, and the lowing of kine, our Concord life is sonorous enough.
Sometimes I hear the cock bestir himself on his perch under my feet,
and crow shrilly long before dawn, and I think I might have been
born any year for all the phenomena I know. We count about sixteen
eggs daily now, when arithmetic will only fetch the hens up to
thirteen; but the world is young, and we wait to see this
eccentricity complete its period.
My verses on Friendship
are already printed in the "Dial";
not expanded but reduced to completeness, by leaving out the long
lines, which always have, or should have, a longer or at least
another sense than short ones.
Just now I am in the mid-sea of verses, and
they actually rustle round me, as the leaves would round the head of
Autummus himself, should he
thrust it up through some vales which I know; but, alas! many of
them are but crisped and yellow leaves like his, I fear, and will
deserve no better fate than to make mould
for new harvests. I see
the stanzas rise around me, verse upon verse, far and near, like the
mountains from Agiocochook, not all having a terrestrial existence
as yet, even as some of them may be
clouds; but I fancy I see the gleam of some Sebago Lake and
Silver Cascade, at whose well I may drink one day.
I am as unfit for any practical purpose—I mean for the
furtherance of the world's ends—as gossamer for ship-timber; and
I, who am going to be a pencil-maker to-morrow, can sympathize with
God Apollo, who served King Admetus for a while on earth. But I
believe he found it for his advantage at last,—as I am sure I
shall, though I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the
service.
Don't attach any undue seriousness
this threnody, for I love my fate to the very core and rind,
and could swallow it without paring it, I think You ask if I have
written any more poems? Excepting those which Vulcan is now forging,
I have only discharged a few more bolts into the horizon,—in all,
three hundred verses,—and sent them, as I may say, over the
mountains to Miss Fuller, who may have occasion to remember the old
rhyme:—
Three
scipen gode
Comen mid than flode
Three hundred cnihten."
But these
are far more Vandalic than they. In this narrow sheet there is not
room even for one thought to root itself. But you must consider this
an odd leaf of a volume, and that volume
Your Friend
Henry D. Thoreau
A
Note on the Text:
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Source:
The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by
Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York: New York University
Press, c1958) p. 46-47.
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