I am on the point of starting for the White Mountains in a wagon with my neighbor Edward Hoar, and I write to you now rather to apologize for not writing, than to answer worthily your three notes. I thank you heartily for them. You will not care for a little delay in acknowledging them, since you date shows that you can afford to wait. Indeed, my head has been so full of company, &c., that I could not reply to you fitly before, nor can I now.

  As for preaching to men these days in the Walden strain,—is it of any consequence to preach to an audience of men who can fail? or who can be revived? There are few beside. Is it any success to interest these parties? If a man has speculated and failed, he will probably do these things again, in spite of you or me.

  I confess that it is rare that I rise to sentiment in my relations to men,—ordinarily to a mere patient, or may be wholesome good-will. I can imagine something more, but the truth compels me to regard the ideal and the actual as two things.

  Channing has come, and as suddenly gone, and left a short poem, “Near Home,” published (?) or printed by Munroe, which I have hardly had time to glance at. As you may guess, I learn nothing of you from him.

  You already foresee my answer to your invitation to make you a summer visit—I am bound for the Mountains. But I trust that you have vanquished, ere this, those dusky demons that seem to lurk around the Head of the River. You know that this warfare is nothing but a kind of nightmare—and it is our thoughts alone which give those unworthies any body or existence.

  I made an excursion with Blake, of Worcester, to Monadnoc, a few weeks since. We took our blankets and food, spent two nights on the mountain, and did not go into a house. Alcott has been very busy for a long time repairing an old shell of a house, and I have seen very little of him. I have looked more at the houses which birds build. Watson made us all very generous presents from his nursery in the spring especially did he remember Alcott. Excuse me for not writing any more at present, and remember me to your family.

  Yours,
  H. D. Thoreau