the Thoreau Log.
22 May 1861. Chicago, Ill.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Saw last p.m. high dune hills along lake & much open oak wood low but old (?) with black trunks but light foliage. Chicago about 14 ft above the lake. Sewers or main drains fall but 2 feet in a mile. Rode down Michigan Avenue. See the land loom across the lake 60 miles. Chicago built chiefly of limestone from 40 miles southwest. Lake street the chief business one. Water milky. Fencing on railroad in Canada & Michigan narrow boards. & Virginia fence. No posts & rails. Another small fenny prairie on Calumet (?) River south of Lake Michigan with that rank dry grass (not bulrush) in it.
(Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 3)
Robert Collyer writes to Thoreau:
Mr. Thoreau

  Dear Sir

  You will find herein the thing you wanted to know. Mr. Whitfield is very well posted about the country and what he says is reliable. I hope you will have a pleasant time get heartily well and write a book about the great West that will be to us what your other books are. A friend, I want you to stop in Chicago as you come back if it can be possible, and be my guest a few days. I should be very much pleased to have you take a rest and feel at home with us, and if you do please write in time so that I shall be sure to be at home.

I am very truly
Robert Collyer

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 617)

Collyer later recalls a visit with Thoreau:

  Thirty-one years ago last June a man came to see me in Chicago whom I was very glad and proud to meet. It was Henry Thoreau, the Diogenes of this new world, the Hermit of Walden Woods. The gentle and loving misanthropist and apostle of individualism so singular and separate that I do not know where to look for his father or son—The most perfect instance to be found I think of American independence run to seed, or shall we say to a mild variety which is very fair to look on but can never sow itself for another harvest. A man of natural mind which was not enmity against God, but in a great and wide sense was subject to the law of God and to no other law. The saint of the bright ages and the own brother in this to the Saint of the dark ages, who called the wild creatures that run and fly his sisters and brothers, and was more intimate with them than he was with our human kind. The man of whom, so far as pure seeing goes, Jesus would have said “blessed are your eyes, for they see,” and whose life I want to touch this evening for some lessons that as it seems to me he alone could teach those who would learn.

  As I remember Henry Thoreau then, he was something over forty years of age but would have easily passed for thirty-five, and he was rather slender, but of a fine delicate mold, and with a presence which touched you with the sense of perfect purity as newly opened roses do. It is a clear rose-tinted face he turns to me through the mist of all these years, and delicate to look on as the face of a girl; also he had great gray eyes, the seer’s eyes full of quiet sunshine. But it is a strong face, too, and the nose is especially notable, being as Conway said to me once of Emerson’s nose, a sort of interrogation mark to the universe. His voice was low, but still sweet in the tones and inflections, though the organs were all in revolt just then and wasting away and he was making for the great tablelands beyond us Westwards, to see if he could not find there a new lease of life. His words also were as distinct and true to the ear as those of a great singer, and he had Tennyson’s splendid gift in this, that he never went back on his tracks to pick up the fallen loops of a sentence as commonplace talkers do. He would hesitate for an instant now and then, waiting for the right word, or would pause with a pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest, but when he was through the sentence was perfect and entire, lacking nothing, and the word was so purely one with the man that when I read his books now and then I do not hear my own voice within my reading but the voice I heard that day.

  This is the picture I treasure of Henry Thoreau as I saw him in my own house the year before he died.

(Clear Grit, 294-295)

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