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).
Thoreau writes to his brother 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
Thoreau writes his poem “The Peal of the Bells” in his journal:
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 . . .
Thoreau writes in his journal:
Thoreau writes in his journal:
Thoreau writes to Ralph Waldo Emerson in New York, N.Y.:
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
Just by old Pestum’s temples and the perch
Where Time doth plume his wings.
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 Concord Freeman notes Thoreau’s lecture of 8 February:
Bronson Alcott writes to his daughter, Anna:
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).
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to his wife Lidian:
Thoreau writes to Thaddeus William Harris:
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
Thoreau writes in his journal:
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