I thank you for your letter. I was very glad to get it—And I am glad again to write to you. However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port.

  I am here still, & very glad to be here—and shall not trouble you with my complaints because I do not fill my place better. I have had many good hours in the chamber at the head of the stairs—a solid time, it seems to me. Next week I am going to give an account to the Lyceum of my expedition to Maine. Theodore Parker lectures tonight—We have had [Edwin Percy] Whipple on Genius—too weighty a subject for him—with his antithetical definitions,—new-vamped—What it is, & what it is not—but altogether what it is not. Cuffing it this way, & cuffing it that, as if it were an India rubber ball. Really, it is a subject which should—expand & accumulate itself before the speaker’s eyes, as he goes on,—like the snow balls which boys roll in the street—& when he stops, it should be so large that he cannot start it—but must leave it there—. [Henry Norman] Hudson too has been here with a dark shadow in the core of him, and his desperate wit so much indebted to the surface of him—wringing out his words and snapping them off like a dish-cloth—very remarkable but not memorable. Singular that these two best lecturers should have so much “wave” in their timber—Their solid parts too be made and kept solid by shrinkage and contraction of the whole—with consequent checks & fissures—Ellen and I have a good understanding—I appreciate her genuineness—Edith tells me after her fashion—“By & by, I shall grow up to be a woman, and then I shall remember how you exercised me.”—Eddie has been to Boston to Christmas—but can remember nothing but the coaches—all [Obadiah] Kendall’s coaches. There is no variety of that vehicle that he is not familiar with.—He did try once to tell us something else, but, after thinking and stuttering a long time—said—“I dont know what the word is,”—the one word, forsooth that would have disposed of all that Boston phenomenon. If you did not know him better than I—I could tell you more. He is a good companion for me—& I am glad that we are all natives of Concord—It is Young Concord—Look out—World.—Mr Alcott seems to have sat down for the winter. He has got Plato and other books to read. He is as large featured—and hospitable to traveling thought & thinkers as ever—but with the same creaking & sneaking Connecticut philosophy as ever, mingled with what is better. If he would only stand straight and toe the line!—though he were to put off several degrees of largeness—and put on a considerable degree of littleness.—After all, I think we must call him particularly your man.—I have pleasant walks and talks with [William Ellery] Channing.—James Clark—the Swedenborgian that was—is at the Poor House—insane with too large views, so that he cannot support himself—I see him working with Fred and the rest. Better than be there not insane. It is strange that they will make an ado when a man’s body is buried—and not when he thus really & tragically dies—or seems to die. Away with your funeral procession,—into the ballroom with them. I hear the bell toll hourly over there.

  Lidian & I have a standing quarrel as to what is a suitable state of preparedness for a traveling Professor’s visits [John Pringle Nichol]—or for whomsoever else—but further than this we are not a war. We have made up a dinner—we have made up a bed—we have made up a party—& our own minds & mouths three several times for your Professor, and he came not—Three several turkeys have died the death—which I myself carved, just as if he had been there, and the company too, convened and demeaned themselves accordingly—Everything was done up in good style, I assure you with only the part of the Professor omitted. To have seen the preparation though Lidian says it was nothing extraordinary—I should certainly have said he was a coming—but he did not. He must have found out some shorter way to Turkey—some overland rout[e]—think. By the way, he was complimented at the conclusion of his course in Boston by the Mayor moving the appointment of a committee to draw up resolutions expressive of &c &c which was done.

  I have made a few verses lately—Here are some—though perhaps not the best—at any rate they are the shortest on that universal theme—yours as well as min, & several other people’s

Good night
Henry Thoreau

I am sorry to send such a medley as this to you. I have forwarded [Charles] Lane’s Dial to [James] Munroe with the proper instructions and he tells the express man that all is right.