Ellery Channing: in Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau

       Nothing bothered him so much as the friendships. Those and his moral sensitiveness. I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life.... Why was he so disappointed with everybody else &c. Why was he so much interested in the river and the woods and the sky &c. Something peculiar I judge.
       — Ellery Channing, in Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. xii.