Thoreau writes in his journal:
James Wood, Senior, told me to-day that Asa[?] Melvin’s father told him that he had seen alewives caught (many of them) in the meadow which we were crossing, on the west of Bateman’s Pond, where there is now no stream, and though it is wet you can walk everywhere; also one shad. He thinks that a greater part of the meadow once belonged to the pond.
Concord, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal:
Dined with Thoreau. We had a walk afterward by the Hosmer Cottage and back by the rail-track. T. tells me that he read his paper on “Walking” lately at Worcester. He should read this, and the “Walden” also, everywhere in our towns and cities, for the soundness and rectitude of the sentiments. They would have a wholesome influence. I sometimes say of T. that he is the purest of our moralists, and the best republican in the Republic—viz., the republican at home. A little over-confident and somewhat stiffly individual, perhaps,—dropping society clean out of his theory, while practically standing friendly in his own strict sense of friendship—there is about him a nobleness and integrity of bearing that make possible and actual the virtues of Rome and Sparta . . . Plutarch would have made him an immortal, had he known him . . .
(The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 250)
