Part 1 of Thoreau’s “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” is published in Graham’s Magazine.
Walden Pond. Thoreau writes the Hannah Dustan section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers while continuing revisions (Revising Mythologies, 255).
Concord, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal:
I was conversing last evening with Thoreau, and it appears to us that, save for Emerson, we have no masters of pure thought and composition on this side of the Atlantic in these days. Nor were Emerson’s merits of the higher order. Continuity and flow were wanting, as we find them in some of the older poets . . . Thoreau’s is a walking Muse, winged at the anklets and rhyming her steps. The ruddiest and nimblest genius that has trodden our woods, he comes amidst mists and exhalations, his locks dripping with moisture, in the sonorous rains of an ever-lyric day. His genius insinuates itself at every pore of us, and eliminates us into the old elements again. A wood-nymph, he abides on the earth and is a sylvan soul. If he could but clap wings to his shoulders or brow and spring forthright into the cope above sometimes, instead of beating the bush and measuring his tread along the march-sides and the river’s sedge and sand, and taking us to some Maine or indian wilderness, and peopling the woods with the Sileni and all the dryads.
But this fits him all the better for his special task of delineating these yet unspoiled American things, and of inspiring us with a sense of their homelier beauties—opening to us the riches of a nation scarcely yet discovered by her own population . . .
Thoreau took his position in Nature, where he was in deed and in spirit—a genius of the natural world, a savage mind amidst savage faculties, yet adorned with the graces of a civilization which he disowned, but celebrating thereby Nature still.
(The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 192-194)
