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  I returned from New Bedford night before last. I met Alcott there & learned from him that probably you had gone to Concord. I am very sorry that I missed you I bad expected you earlier, & at last thought that I should get back before you came, but I ought to have notified you of my absence. However, it would have been too late, after I had made up my mind to go. I hope you lost nothing by going a little round.

  I took out the Celtis seeds at your request, at the time we spoke of them, and left them in the chamber on some shelf or other. If you have found them, and left them in the chamber on some shelf or other. If you have found them, very well; if you have not found them, very well; but tell [Edward Everett] Hale of it, if you see him.
My Mother says that you & [Theo] Brown & [Seth] Rogers & [David A.] Wasson talk of “coming down on” me some day. Do not fail to to come one & all, and within a week or two, if possible, else I may be gone again. Give me a short notice, and then come & spend a day on Concord River—or say that you will come if it is fair, unless you are confident of bringing fair weather with you. Come & be Concord, as I have been Worcestered.

  Perhaps you came nearer to me for not finding me at home, for trains of thought the more connected wien trains of ears do not. If I had actually met you, you would have gone again, but now I have not yet dismissed you.
I hear what you say about personal relations with joy. It is as if you were to say, I value the best & finest part of you, & not the worst. I can even endure your very near & real appreach, & prefer it to a shake of the hand. This intercourse is not subject to time or dis[tance.

  I have a very long new and faithful le]tter from Chilmondeley which I wish to show you. He speaks of sending me more books!!

  If I were with you now I could tell you much of Ricketson, and my visit to New Bedford, but I do not know how it will be by & by. I should like to have you meet R—who is the frankest man I know. Alcott & he get along very well together. Channing has returned to Concord with me, probably for a short visit only. Consider this a business letter, which you know counts nothing in the game we play.

  Remember me particularly to Brown.

  How pleasing and soothing are some of the first and least audible sounds of awakened nature in the spring, as this first humming of bees, etc., and the stuttering of frogs! They cannot be called musical . . . Nature has taken equal care to cushion our ears on this finest sound and to inspire us with the strains of the wood thrush and poet. We may say that each gnat is made to vibrate its wings for man’s fruition. In short, we hear but little music in the world which charms us more than this sound produced by the vibration of an insect’s wing and in some still and sunny nook in spring . . .

  J. Brown says that he saw martins on his box on the 13th and 14th, and that his son saw one the 18th (?) . . .

  The lines “Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy” are suffused with a sweet elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the loss of their foraging friend and essayed to sing their grief in their murmuring leaves. So the essay on “Friendship” wears a sylvan sympathetic manner, and carries a heart of oak in its bosom—so brave, so self-helpful, so defiant, and yet so sternly kind and wholesome in its counsels. No man lives in so close a companionship and so constant with Nature, or breathes more of the spirit of pure poetry. And in this lies his excellence; for when the heart is divorced from Nature, from the society of living, moving things, poetry has fled, and the love that sings.