September 1858
Salem or Gloucester, Massachusetts

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        On Tuesday, 21 September 1858, Thoreau traveled to Salem, where he met the lichenist John Russell. That afternoon the two set off on foot to Cape Ann, where they stayed until Friday, 24 September. Thoreau’s journal record of the excursion gives no indication that he may have delivered a lecture while at Salem or while on the cape (J, 11:170-80). But in a long, blustery, phlegmatic entry in his journal on 16 November, he railed against (among other things) his inability to get a fair hearing as a lecturer. After mentioning "One of our New England towns" that "is sealed up hermetically like a molasses hogshead" and "a cape which runs six miles into the sea that has not a man of moral courage upon it"—the latter clearly a reference to Cape Ann—Thoreau wrote:

        I have been into the town, being invited to speak to the inhabitants, not valuing, not having read even, the Assembly’s Catechism, and I try to stimulate them by reporting the best of my experience. I see the craven priest looking round for a hole to escape at, alarmed because it was he that invited me thither, and an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony and shallow ground. (J, 11:326-327)

A little later in the entry, Thoreau writes, "It is no compliment to be invited to lecture before the rich Institutes and Lyceums"; and later still he mentions Boston’s "Lowell Institute with its restrictions, requiring a certain faith in the lecturers" and "the Philomathean Institute in the next large town," which kept a list of unoffending lecturers (J, 11:327, 328). All of this suggests that Thoreau had delivered a lecture recently, and most likely while on his excursion to Salem and Cape Ann, but we have found no record of such a lecture.