Concord, Mass. Thoreau writes in his journal:
Last night a snow-storm, and this morning we find the ground covered again six or eight inches deep—and drifted pretty badly beside. The conductor in the cars, which have been detained more than an hour, says it is a dry snow up-country. Here it is very damp.
Boston, Mass. Thoreau lectures on “Life in the Woods” at Cochituate Hall (“Life in the Woods (II)“).
Thomas Wentworth Higginson later recalls the lecture:
The scene of the lecture was to be a small hall in a court . . . opening form Tremont street, opposite King’s Chapel, the hall itself being leased by an association of young mechanics, who had a reading-room opening out of it. The appointed day ushered in a furious snow-storm before which the janitor of the building retreated in despair, leaving the court almost blockaded. When Thoreau and I ploughed through, we found a few young mechanics reading newspapers; and when the appointed hour came, there were assembled only Mr. [Amos Bronson] Alcott, Dr. Walter Channing and at most three or four ticket-holders. No one wished to postpone the affair and Mr. Alcott suggested that the thing to be done was to adjourn to the reading-room, where, he doubted not, the young men would be grateful for the new gospel offered; for which he himself undertook to prepare their minds. I can see him now, going from one to another, or collecting them in little groups and expounding to them, with his lofty Socratic mien, the privileges they were to shar. “This is his life, this is his book; he is to print it presently; I think we shall all be glad, shall we not, either to read his book or to hear it?” Some laid down their newspapers, more retained them; the lecture proved to be one of the most introspective chapters from “Walden.” A few went to sleep, the rest rustled their papers; and the most vivid impression which I retain from the whole enterprise is the profound gratitude I felt to one auditor (Dr. Walter Channing), who forced upon me a five-dollar bill towards the expenses of the disastrous entertainment.
(Brains, no. 1 (December 1981):105)
Boston, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal and includes a clipping from an unidentified periodical:
Thoreau is here, and reads his lecture this evening, and passes the night with me.
Mr. Thoreau’s Lecture.—Those of our readers who wish to hear something fresh and invigorating in literature, should not fail to attend this evening at Cochituate Hall. No subject suits Mr. Thoreau better, as a text, than Life in the Woods, and perhaps no man in the world is better qualified form disposition and experience, to treat that subject profitably. Conventionalisms have about as much influence over him, as over a forest tree or the birds in its branches. And as with his freshness of thought he unites a rare maturity of scholarship, he can entertain any one who is not muffled in more than ordinary dullness.
Boston, Mass. Thoreau checks out Sylva, or a discourse of forest trees by John Evelyn from the Boston Society of Natural History (Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 24 (March 1952):24).
