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 & chamber work. Even now I am probably the greatest walker in Concord—it its disgrace be it said. I remember our walks & talks & 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

  Shall then the maple yield sugar, & not man? Shall the farmer be thus active, & 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, & to sugar it shall come; it shall not all go to leaves & wood. I am 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 work 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, & watch it set & crystalize—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 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 Mt. Mide.—Let the world await him.

  Then will the little boys bless you, & the great boys too, for such sugar is the origin of many condiments—Blakeians, in the sops of Worcester, of new form, with their mottos wrapped up in them.

  Shall men taste only the sweetness of the maple & the cane, the coming year?

  A walk over the crust to Asnybumskit, 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.

  H.D.T