Thoreau writes in his journal:
This night I heard Mrs. S— [Elizabeth Oakes Smith] lecture on womanhood. The most important fact about the lecture was that a woman said it, and in that respect it was suggestive. Went to see her afterward, but the interview added nothing to the previous impression, rather subtracted . . . I carried her lecture for her in my pocket wrapped in her handkerchief; my pocket exhales cologne to this moment . . .
Through the drizzling fog, now just before nightfall, I see from the Cliffs the dark cones of pine trees that rise above the level of the tree-tops, and can trace a few elm tree tops where a farmhouse hides beneath.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith later recalls: