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  I did not sooner write you, because there were pre-engagements for the two or three first lectures, so that I could not arrange matters to have you come during the present month. But, as it happens, the expected lectures have failed us; and we now depend on you to come this very next Wednesday. I shall announce you in the paper of tomorrow, so you must come. I regret that I could not give you longer notice.

  We shall expect you on Wednesday, at No 14 Mall, Street.

Yours truly,
Nath Hawthorne.

If it is utterly impossible for you come, pray write me a line so that I may get it Wednesday morning. But, by all means, come.

This Secretaryship is an intolerable bore. I have travelled thirty miles, this wet day for no other business.

At present I am subsisting on certain wild flowers which nature wafts to me, which unaccountable sustain me, and make my apparently poor life rich. Within a year my walks have extended themselves, and almost every afternoon (I read, or write, or make pencils, in the forenoon, and by the last means get a living for my body.) I visit some new hill or pond many miles distant. I am astonished at the wonderful retirement through which I move, rarely meeting a man in these excursions, never seeing one similarly engaged, unless it be my companion, when I have one. I cannot help feeling that of all the human inhabitants of nature hereabouts, only we two have leisure to admire and enjoy our inheritance

“Free in this world, as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruit of their works.”

Depend upon it that rude and careless as I am, I would fain practise the yoga faithfully

“The yogin, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he heards wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to a nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts, as animating original matter.”

To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin.

I know little about the affairs of Turkey, but I am sure that I know something about barberries and ches[t]nuts of which I have collected a store this fall. When I go to see my neighbor he will formally communicate to me the latest news from Turkey, which he read in yesterday’s Mail-how Turkey by this time looks determined & Lord Palmerston-Why, I would rather talk of the bran, which unfortunately, was sifted out of my break this morning and thrown away. It is a fact which lies nearer to me. The newspaper gossip with which our hosts abuse our ears is as far from  true hospitality as the vians which they set before us. We did not need them to feed our bodies; and the news can be bought for a penny. We want the inevitable news, be it sad or cheering- wherefore and by what means they are extant, this new day. If they are well let them whistle and dance; If they are dyspeptic, it is their duty to complain, that so they may in any case be entertaining. If words are invented on a bad invention. Do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers.

I thank you for your appreciation of my book. I am glad to have had such a long talk with you, and that you had the patience to listen to me to the end. I think that I have the advantage of you, for I chose my own mood, and in one sense your mood too, that is a quiet and attentive reading mood. Such advantages has the writer over the talker.

I am sorry that you did not come to Concord in your vacation. Is it not time for another vacation? I am here yet, and Concord is here.

You will have found out by this time who it is that writes this, and will be glad to have you write, to him, without his subscribing himself.

Henry D. Thoreau

P. S. It is so long since I have seen you, that as you will perceive, I have to speak as it were in vacuum, as if I were sounding hollowly for an echo, & it did not make much odds what kind of a sound I made. But the gods do not hear my rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the echo; and I know that the nature toward which I launch these sounds is so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest strain.

  You may perhaps believe that I am writing to you from Ireland and not from Portland, making a blunder even in the date of the letter, when you read that this is for the purpose of apologizing for and correcting another error—I intended and ought to have designated the evening of January 15th and not of January 8th or 10th, as that on which we hoped to hear a lecture from you.

  With the wish that this newly appointed time, the fifteenth of January next, maybe equally acceptable to you,

  I am With great respect, Yours truly

  J. Pierce, Jr

  As I was riding by the Ministerial Lot this morning about 8.30 A. M., I observed that the white clouds were disposed raywise in the west and also in the east,—as if the sun’s rays had split and so arranged them? . . . Mr. J. Hosmer tells me that one spring he saw a red squirrel gnaw the bark of a maple and then suck the juice, and this he repeated many times.

  What is the bush where we dined in Poplar Hollow? Hosmer tells of finding a kind of apple, with an apple seed (?) to it, on scabish which had been injured or cut off. Thinks plowed ground more moist than grass ground.

  Still quite warm as yesterday. I wear no greatcoat. There has been no freezing in the night. I hear a single hylodes in the wood by the water, while I am raking the cranberries. This warmth has aroused him. While raking, I disturbed two bullfrogs, one quite small. These, too, the warm weather has perhaps aroused. They appear rather stupid. Also I see one painted tortoise, but with no bright markings. Do they fade? . . .

  Minott said he heard geese going south at daybreak the 17th, before he came out of the house . . .

  Reached Canal Street at 5 P.M., or candle-light.

  Started for Philadelphia from foot of Liberty Street at 6 P.M. via Newark, etc., etc., Bordentown, etc., etc., Camden Ferry, to Philadelphia, all in the dark . . . Arrive at 10 P.M.; four hours from New York, thirteen from Boston, fifteen from Concord. Put up at Jones’s Exchange Hotel, 77 Dock Street; lodgings thirty-seven and a half cents, meals separate . . .