The manuscript of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers has expanded to 90,000 words from 70,000 in March (Revising Mythologies, 255).
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to William Henry Furness:
I write because Henry D. Thoreau has a book to print. Henry D. Thoreau is a great man in Concord, a man of original genius & character, who knows Greek, & knows Indian also,—not the language quite as well as John Eliot—but the history monuments & genius of the Sachems, being a pretty good Sachem himself, master of all woodcraft, & an intimate associate of the birds, beasts, & fishes, of this region. I could tell you many a good story of his forest life.—He has written what he calls ‘A week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers,’ which is an account of an excursion made by himself & his brother (in a boat which he built) some time ago, from Concord, Mass., down the Concord river & up the Merrimack, to Concord, N. H.—I think it a book of wonderful merit, which is to go far & last long. It will remind you of Izaak Walton, and, if it have not all his sweetness, it is rich, as he is not, in profound thought.—Thoreau sent the manuscript lately to [Evert] Duyckinck,—Wiley & Putnam’s literary Editor, who examined it, & “gave a favorable opinion of it to W. & P.” They have however declined publishing it. And I have promised Thoreau that I would inquire a little in N. Y. & Philadelphia before we begin to set our own types. Would Mr. Hart, or Mr. Kay like to see such a manuscript? It will make a book as big as my First Series of Essays. They shall have it on half profits or on any reasonable terms. Thoreau is mainly bent on having it printed in a cheap form for a large circulation . . . Will not Henry Thoreau serve as well as another apology for writing to you . . . It may easily happen that you have too many affairs even to ask the question of the booksellers. Then simply say that you do not; for my party is Anarcharsis the Scythian, and as imperturbable as Osceola.
(Records of a Lifelong Friendship, 60-62)
