At present I am subsisting on certain wild flowers which nature wafts to me, which unaccountable sustain me, and make my apparently poor life rich. Within a year my walks have extended themselves, and almost every afternoon (I read, or write, or make pencils, in the forenoon, and by the last means get a living for my body.) I visit some new hill or pond many miles distant. I am astonished at the wonderful retirement through which I move, rarely meeting a man in these excursions, never seeing one similarly engaged, unless it be my companion, when I have one. I cannot help feeling that of all the human inhabitants of nature hereabouts, only we two have leisure to admire and enjoy our inheritance

“Free in this world, as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruit of their works.”

Depend upon it that rude and careless as I am, I would fain practise the yoga faithfully

“The yogin, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he heards wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to a nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts, as animating original matter.”

To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin.

I know little about the affairs of Turkey, but I am sure that I know something about barberries and ches[t]nuts of which I have collected a store this fall. When I go to see my neighbor he will formally communicate to me the latest news from Turkey, which he read in yesterday’s Mail-how Turkey by this time looks determined & Lord Palmerston-Why, I would rather talk of the bran, which unfortunately, was sifted out of my break this morning and thrown away. It is a fact which lies nearer to me. The newspaper gossip with which our hosts abuse our ears is as far from  true hospitality as the vians which they set before us. We did not need them to feed our bodies; and the news can be bought for a penny. We want the inevitable news, be it sad or cheering- wherefore and by what means they are extant, this new day. If they are well let them whistle and dance; If they are dyspeptic, it is their duty to complain, that so they may in any case be entertaining. If words are invented on a bad invention. Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.

I thank you for your appreciation of my book. I am glad to have had such a long talk with you, and that you had the patience to listen to me to the end. I think that I have the advantage of you, for I chose my own mood, and in one sense your mood too, that is a quiet and attentive reading mood. Such advantages has the writer over the talker.

I am sorry that you did not come to Concord in your vacation. Is it not time for another vacation? I am here yet, and Concord is here.

You will have found out by this time who it is that writes this, and will be glad to have you write, to him, without his subscribing himself.

Henry D. Thoreau

P. S. It is so long since I have seen you, that as you will perceive, I have to speak as it were in vacuum, as if I were sounding hollowly for an echo, & it did not make much odds what kind of a sound I made. But the gods do not hear my rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the echo; and I know that the nature toward which I launch these sounds is so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest strain.