The Thoreau
Institute at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's Life &
Writings: Correspondence
_____
HDT to H.G.O.
Blake
Concord, 13 March 1856
Concord,
May 13, 1856
Mr.
Blake, — It is high time I sent you a
word. I have not heard
from Harrisburg since offering to go there, and have not been
invited to lecture anywhere else the past winter.
So you see I am fast growing rich.
This is quite right, for such is my relation to the
lecture-goers. I should
be surprised and alarmed if there were any great call for me. I
confess that I am considerably alarmed even when I hear that an
individual wishes to
meet me, for my experience teaches me that we shall thus only be
made certain of a mutual strangeness, which otherwise we might never
have been aware of.
I have not yet recovered strength enough
for such a walk as you propose, though pretty well again for
circumscribed rambles and chamber work.
Even now I am probably the greatest walker in Concord — to
its disgrace be it said. I remember our walks and talks and
sailing in the past with great satisfaction, and trust that we shall
have more of them ere long —
have more woodings-up — for even in the spring we must
still seek “fuel to maintain our fires.”
As you
suggest, we would fain value one another for what we are absolutely,
rather than relatively. How
will this do for a symbol of sympathy?
As for compliments, even the stars praise me, and I praise them.
They and I sometimes belong to a mutual admiration society. Is it not so with you? I
know you of old. Are
you not tough and earnest to be talked at, praised or blamed? Must you
go out of the room because you are the subject of conversation? Where will you go to pray?
Shall we look into the “Letter Writer” to see what
compliments are admissible? I
am not afraid of praise for I have practiced it on myself.
As for my deserts, I never took an account of that stock, and
in this connection care not whether I am deserving or not.
When I hear praise coming
do I not elevate and arch myself to hear it like the sky, and
as impersonally? Think I appropriate any of it to my weak legs?
No. Praise away till all is blue.
I see by the newspapers that the
season for making sugar is at hand — Now is the time, whether you
be rock or white maple, or hickory. I trust that you have prepared a store of sap tubs and sumach
spouts, and invested largely in kettles. Early the first frosty
morning tap your maples
— the sap will not run in summer, you know. It matters not how
little juice you get, if you get all you can, and boil it down.
I made just one crystal of sugar once, one twentieth of an
inch cube out of a pumpkin, and it sufficed. Though the yield be no
greater than that, this is not less the reason for
it, and it will be not the less sweet, nay, it will be
infinitely the sweeter.
Shall then the maple yield sugar, and not
man? Shall the farmer
be thus active, and
surely have so much sugar to show for it before this very March is
gone, — While
I read the newspaper? While
he works in his sugar camp, let me work in mine, — for sweetness
is in me, and to sugar it
shall come, — it
shall not all go to leaves
and wood. Am I not a sugar-maple
man, then? Boil
down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. Stop not at syrup, — go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal, — a crystal not made from trees
in your yard, but from the new
life that stirs in your pores.
Cheerfully skim your kettle, and
watch it set and crystallize — making a holiday of it, if you will. Heaven will be propitious to you as
to him.
Say to the farmer: There is your crop; Here is mine. Mine is a sugar to sweeten sugar with. If you will listen to me, I will sweeten your
whole load, — your whole life.
Then will the callers ask, Where is
Blake? He is in his sugar-camp
on the mountainside. Let the world await him. Then
will the little boys bless you, and the great boys too, for such
sugar is the origin of many condiments, — Blakians in the shops of
Worcester, of new form, with their mottoes wrapped up in them. Shall
men taste only the sweetness of the maple and the cane the coming
year?
A walk over the crust to Asnebumskit,
standing there in its inviting simplicity; is tempting to think of,
— making a fire on the snow under some rock!
The very poverty of outward nature implies an inward wealth
in the walker. What a
Golconda is he conversant with, thawing
his fingers over such a blaze! But — but —
Have you read the new poem, “The Angel in the House” Perhaps you will find it good
for you.
A
Note on the Text:
-
Source:
Familiar Letters edited by F.B. Sanborn [The Writings of
Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) p. 276-279.
-
Report
errors to the
Curator of
Collections
|
