Let me thank you heartily for your paper on the present condition of Massachusetts, read at Framingham and printed in the Liberator. As a literary statement of the truth, which every day is making more manifest, it surpasses everything else (so I think), which the terrible week in Boston has called out. I need hardly add my thanks for “Walden,” which I have been awaiting for so many years. Through Mr. [James T.] Field’s kindness, I have read a great deal of it in sheets;—I have just secured two copies, one for myself, and one for a young girl here, who seems to me to have the most remarkable literary talent since Margaret Fuller,—and to whom your first book has been among the scriptures, ever since I gave her that. (No doubt your new book will have a larger circulation than the other, but not, I think, a more select or appreciate one.)