Thoreau writes to Richard Fuller:
I need not thank you for your present for I hear its music, which seems to be playing just for us two pilgrims marching over hill and dale of a summer afternoon—up those long Bolton hills and by those bright Harvard lakes, such as I see in the placid Lucerne on the lid—and whenever I hear it, I will recall happy hours passed with its donor.
When did mankind make that foray into nature and bring off this booty—? For certainly it is but history that some rare virtue in remote times plundered these strains from above, and communicated them to men. Whatever we may think of it, it is a part of the harmony of the spheres you have sent me, which has condescended to serve us Admetuses—and I hope I may so behave that this may always be the tenor of your thought for me.
If you have any strains, the conquest of your own spear or quill to accompany these, let the winds waft them also to me.
I write this with one of the “primaries” of my osprey’s wings, which I have preserved over my glass for some state occasion—and now it affords.
Mrs. Emerson [Lidian Jackson Emerson] sends her love—Yr friend,
Henry D. Thoreau
“Richard Fuller was a younger brother of Margaret Fuller and of Ellen, the wife of Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing. It seems probable that the girl of the music box was made in return for Thoreau’s tutoring to help young Fuller enter Harvard.”
