Boston, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal:
Henry Thoreau comes and passes the afternoon and evening; also sleeps under my roof. Avery welcome guest, this countryman. I meet nobody whose thoughts are so invigorating as his, and who comes so scented of mountain breezes and springs, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His company is tonic, never insipid, like ice-water in the dog days to the parched citizen spent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome then as the gurgle of brooks and drippings of pitchers! Then drink and be cool! Without this admirable glacier how would we stand the summer heats, how find shade under torrid climes? Our milk and meats would sour and taint, our butter melt, and our friendships dissolve into jellies. The world would get valetudinarian and consumptive. But here is a gelid man and valid, sane and salt, and will keep forever – a friend who comes never too often nor stays too long – comes, it may be, a little unwillingly too, and uncommuningly, as streams descend into the urbane vallies below, yet sighing as they descend, leaving their mountain sources behind.
(The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 257-258)
Cambridge, Mass. Thoreau checks out The Life of Sir Charles Linnaeus by Dietrich Johann Heinrich Stöver, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France by Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, volumes 1, 2, and 3, and A general view of the writings of Linnaeus by Richard Pulteney from Harvard College Library.
(Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 290; Thoreau’s Reading)
Boston, Mass. Thoreau checks out Encyclopedia of plants by John Claudius Loudon from the Boston Society of Natural History (Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 24 (March 1952):24; Thoreau’s Reading).
