Thoreau writes in his journal:
I am not taken up, like Moses, upon a mountain to learn the law, but lifted up in my seat here, in the warm sunshine and genial light.
They who are ready to go are already invited.
Neither men nor things have any true mode of invitation but to be inviting.
Can that be a task which all things abet, and to postpone which is to strive against nature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to Margaret Fuller:
I intended to ask you what rules of distribution do you adopt [for the Dial]. Here is Henry Thoreau who subscribed; but I told Weeks & Co. that he is a contributor & not to be charged; for he ought not to pay . . . One thing more—they made sad typographical errors. In Thoreau’s Persius they have printed nature for satire p. 118—(Do correct it where you see the book) and in the Latin per for pes recretam for secretam.
(The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2:310-231)
