When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor and for the most part the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the paper or been out to tea & we have not. But the London Times even is not one of the muses. It is no better when poet laureates writes to you there. When a man’s inward life fails, he begins to go more constantly & desperately to the post office, and despatches couriers to the other side of the globe; and so again he gains the whole world & loses his own soul.

  It appears that you think yourself reestablished by this time & that your leisure was again hindered.

  I like yr keeping at yr “noble task.”

Yours

Henry D Thoreau