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10 February 1835. Cambridge, Mass.

Thoreau checks out Euripides’ Alcestis and Ion from Harvard College Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 287).

Thoreau also attends a meeting of the Institute of 1770, in which the topic “Is the immense mass of Literature of the present day beneficial?” is debated and Edward Henry Kettel lectures on the “Character of Washington” (The Transcendentalists and Minerva, 1:82).

10 February 1838. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes to his brother John:

Dear John,—

  Dost expect to elicit a spark from so dull a steel as myself, by that flinty subject of thine? Truly, one of your copper percussion caps would have fitted this nail-head better.

  Unfortunately, the “Americana” has hardly two words on the subject. The process is very simple. The stone is struck with a mallet so as to produce pieces sharp at one end, and blunt at the other. These are laid upon a steel line (probably a chisel’s edge), and again struck with the mallet, and flints of the required size are broken off. A skilled workman may make a thousand a day.

  So much for the “Americana.” Dr. Jacob Bigelow in his “Technology” says, “Gun-flints are formed by a skillful workman, who breaks them out with a hammer, a roller, and small chisel, with small repeated strokes.”

  Your ornithological commission shall be executed. When are you coming home?

Your affectionate brother,
Henry D. Thoreau

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 23; Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894), 20–1)
10 February 1839. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes his poem “The Peal of the Bells” in his journal:

When the world grows old by the chimney-side,
Then forth to the youngling rocks I glide,
Where over the water, and over the land,
The bells are booming on either hand.

Now up they go ding, then down again dong,
And awhile they swing to the same old song,
And the metal goes round at a single bound,
A-lulling the fields with its measured sound,
Till the tired tongue falls with a lengthened boom
As solemn and loud as the crack of doom . . .

(Journal, 1:73-74)
10 February 1840. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  CRITICISM ON AULUS PERSIUS PLACCUS (Journal, 1:117).
10 February 1841. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  I asked a man to-day if he would rent me some land, and he said he had four acres as good soil “as any outdoors.” It was a true poet’s account of it. He and I, and all the world, went outdoors to breathe the free air and stretch ourselves. For the world is but outdoors,—and we duck behind a panel.
(Journal, 1:210-211)
10 February 1843. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes to Ralph Waldo Emerson in New York, N.Y.:

Dear Friend,—

  I have stolen one of your own sheets to write you a letter upon, and I hope, with two layers of ink, to turn it into a comforter. If you like to receive a letter from me, too, I am glad, for it gives me pleasure to write. But don’t let it come amiss; it must fall as harmlessly as leaves settle on the landscape. I will tell you what we are doing this now. Supper is done, and Edith—the dessert, perhaps, more than the desert—is brought in, or even comes in per se; and round she goes, now to this altar, and then to that, with her monosyllabic invocation of “oc,” “oc.” It makes me think of “Langue d’oc.” She must belong to that province. And like the gipsies she talks a language of her own while she understands outs. While she jabbers Sanscrit, Parsec, Pehlvi, say “Edith go bah!” and “bah” it is. No intellignece passes between us. She knows. It is a capital joke,—that is the reason she smiles so. How well the secret is kept! she never descends to explanation. It is not buried like a common secret, bolstered up on two sides, but by an eternal silence on the one side, at least. It has been long kept, and comes in from the unexplored horizon, like a blue mountain range, to end abruptly at our door one day. (Don’t stumble at this steep simile.) And now she studies the heights and depths of nature

On shoulders whirled in some eccentric orbit
Just by old Pestum’s temples and the perch
Where Time doth plume his wings.
  And how she runs the race over the carpet, while all Olympia applauds,—mamma, grandma, and uncle, good Grecians all,—and that dark-hued barbarian, Partheanna Parker, whose shafts go through and through, not backward! Grandmamma smiles over all, and mamma is wondering what papa would say, should she descend on Carlton House some day. “Lark’s night” ’s abed, dreaming of “pleased faces” far away. But now the trumpet sounds, the games are over; some Hebe comes, and Edith is translated. I don’t know where; it must be to some cloud, for I never was there.

  Query: what becomes of the answers Edith thinks, but cannot express? She really gives you glances which are before this world was. You can’t feel any difference of age, except that you have longer legs and arms.

  Mrs. Emerson said I must tell you about domestic affairs, when I mentioned that I was going to write. Perhaps it will inform you of the state of all if I only say that I am well and happy in your house here in Concord.

Your friend,
Henry.

Don’t forget to tell us what to do with Mr. [Theodore] Parker, when you write next. I lectured this week. It was as bright a night as you could wish. I hope there were stars thrown away on the occasion.

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 83-84)

The Concord Freeman notes Thoreau’s lecture of 8 February:

  Mr. Thoreau’s Lecture, delivered last Wednesday evening, before the Lyceum, is spoken of as a production very creditable to its author. The subject was the life and character of Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was one of the most remarkable men of a remarkable period, the Elizabethan age. He was learned, brave and adventurous, and was possessed of such varied intellectual powers, as to be esteemed as a writer, a statesman, and a soldier. Those who are wholly unacquainted with his writings, have yet to explore a mine of intellect which has few equals in point of richness. Like the productions of all those men whom we are accustomed to call the old English prose writers,—and who terminated with the author of the “Urn Burial,”—they are literally tilled with profound thought, which finds its expression in the most nervous language. The public conduct of Raleigh is well known to every historical reader, and no one will be found to question the accuracy of the assertion, that much of it added to the glory of the English name. Yet he had many bad traits of character, and is scarcely deserving of the admiration of which he is the object, and which, it is quite probable, had its origin in his melancholy fate and has been kept up in these latter days thro’ the genius of Scott. Raleigh was a selfish man, and to say that many of his acts were superlatively mean, would be but to utter a simple truth. In adventure, he was but a high sort of Mike Lambourne, and readily subscribed to the creed of those “jolly fellows” who held that there was no law beyond the line. His conduct in his last voyage was clearly illegal, and Gondomar was right when he called him and his comrades pirates. He was haughty, insolent, and vindictive, an unchivalrous enemy, and too often a deceitful friend. But he is one of the world’s favorites, and the closing scene of his life atoned in the opinion of many for all his errors.
(Concord Freeman, 10 February 1843:2)
10 February 1847. Concord, Mass.

Bronson Alcott writes to his daughter, Anna:

  For the rest, our friend Henry shall answer and explain in the Lecture you hear this evening.

(The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, 129).

Concord, Mass. Thoreau lectures on “A History of Myself” at the Unitarian Church for the Concord Lyceum (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1995, 150-151).

10 February 1848. Gateshead upon Tyne, England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to his wife Lidian:

  My reception here is really a premium often on authorship, & if Henry Thoreau means one day to come to England let him not delay another day to print his book [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers] (The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4:16).
10 February 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes to Thaddeus William Harris:

Dear Sir,

  I return by the bearer De Laet’s “Novus Orbis” &c. Will you please send me Alfred Hawkins’ “Picture of Quebec” and “Silliman’s Tour of Quebec”?

  If these are not in—then Wytfliet’s “Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Argumentum &c and Lescarbot “Les Muses de la Nouvelle France.”

  Yrs respectly

  Henry D. Thoreau

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 272)
Cambridge, Mass. Thaddeus William Harris apparently sends Hawkins’s picture of Quebec; with historical recollections and Remarks made on a short tour between Hartford and Quebec, in the autumn of 1819 by Benjamin Silliman to Thoreau from Harvard College Library.
(Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 289)
10 February 1852. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Now if there are any who think that I am vainglorious, that I set myself up above others and crow over their low estate, let me tell them that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as them, if my spirits held out to do it; I could encourage them with a sufficient list of failures, and could flow as humbly as the very gutters themselves; I could enumerate a list of as rank offenses as ever reached the nostrils of heaven ; that I think worse of myself than they can possibly think of me, being better acquainted with the man. I put the best face on the matter. I will tell them this secret, if they will not tell it to anybody else.
(Journal, 3:293-294)

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