A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal:
Channing [William Ellery Channing] writes tenderly of Thoreau’s confinement, and I see him this morning and find his hoarseness forbids his going out as usual. ’Tis a serious thing to one who has been less a house-keeper than any man in town, has lived out of doors, for the best part of his life, has harvested more wind and storm, sun and sky, and has more weather in him, than any – night and day abroad with his leash of keen senses, hounding any game stirring, and running it down for certain, to be spread on the dresser of his page before he sleeps and served as a feast of wild meats to all sound intelligences like his. If any can make game for his confinement it must be himself, and for solace, if sauce of the sort is desired by one so healthy as he has seemed hitherto. We have been accustomed to consider him the salt of things so long that we are loath to believe it has lost savor; since if it has, then “Pan is dead” and Nature ails throughout.
I find him in spirits—busied, he tells me, with his Journal, and, bating his out-of-doors, in his usual trim. Fair weather and spring time, I trust, are to prove his best physicians, and the woods and fields know their old friend again presently.
(The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 333)
