Log Search Results

22 May 1858. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Ed. Emerson brings me the egg of a hawk, dirty bluish-white, just found, with three other eggs not much developed, in a nest on the ground . . .

  P. M.—By cars to Worcester, on way to New York . . . (Journal, 10:439-440).

22 May 1859. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  A warm, drizzling day, the tender yellow leafets now generally conspicuous, and contrasting with the almost black evergreens which they have begun to invest. The foliage is never more conspicuously a tender yellow than now . . .
(Journal, 12:189-190)
22 May 1860. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  C. [William Ellery Channing] hears a cuckoo, and appears, by his account, to have seen the Sylvia maculosa . . . (Journal, 13:306).
22 May 1861. Chicago, Ill.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Saw last p.m. high dune hills along lake & much open oak wood low but old (?) with black trunks but light foliage. Chicago about 14 ft above the lake. Sewers or main drains fall but 2 feet in a mile. Rode down Michigan Avenue. See the land loom across the lake 60 miles. Chicago built chiefly of limestone from 40 miles southwest. Lake street the chief business one. Water milky. Fencing on railroad in Canada & Michigan narrow boards. & Virginia fence. No posts & rails. Another small fenny prairie on Calumet (?) River south of Lake Michigan with that rank dry grass (not bulrush) in it.
(Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey, 3)
Robert Collyer writes to Thoreau:
Mr. Thoreau

  Dear Sir

  You will find herein the thing you wanted to know. Mr. Whitfield is very well posted about the country and what he says is reliable. I hope you will have a pleasant time get heartily well and write a book about the great West that will be to us what your other books are. A friend, I want you to stop in Chicago as you come back if it can be possible, and be my guest a few days. I should be very much pleased to have you take a rest and feel at home with us, and if you do please write in time so that I shall be sure to be at home.

I am very truly
Robert Collyer

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 617)

Collyer later recalls a visit with Thoreau:

  Thirty-one years ago last June a man came to see me in Chicago whom I was very glad and proud to meet. It was Henry Thoreau, the Diogenes of this new world, the Hermit of Walden Woods. The gentle and loving misanthropist and apostle of individualism so singular and separate that I do not know where to look for his father or son—The most perfect instance to be found I think of American independence run to seed, or shall we say to a mild variety which is very fair to look on but can never sow itself for another harvest. A man of natural mind which was not enmity against God, but in a great and wide sense was subject to the law of God and to no other law. The saint of the bright ages and the own brother in this to the Saint of the dark ages, who called the wild creatures that run and fly his sisters and brothers, and was more intimate with them than he was with our human kind. The man of whom, so far as pure seeing goes, Jesus would have said “blessed are your eyes, for they see,” and whose life I want to touch this evening for some lessons that as it seems to me he alone could teach those who would learn.

  As I remember Henry Thoreau then, he was something over forty years of age but would have easily passed for thirty-five, and he was rather slender, but of a fine delicate mold, and with a presence which touched you with the sense of perfect purity as newly opened roses do. It is a clear rose-tinted face he turns to me through the mist of all these years, and delicate to look on as the face of a girl; also he had great gray eyes, the seer’s eyes full of quiet sunshine. But it is a strong face, too, and the nose is especially notable, being as Conway said to me once of Emerson’s nose, a sort of interrogation mark to the universe. His voice was low, but still sweet in the tones and inflections, though the organs were all in revolt just then and wasting away and he was making for the great tablelands beyond us Westwards, to see if he could not find there a new lease of life. His words also were as distinct and true to the ear as those of a great singer, and he had Tennyson’s splendid gift in this, that he never went back on his tracks to pick up the fallen loops of a sentence as commonplace talkers do. He would hesitate for an instant now and then, waiting for the right word, or would pause with a pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest, but when he was through the sentence was perfect and entire, lacking nothing, and the word was so purely one with the man that when I read his books now and then I do not hear my own voice within my reading but the voice I heard that day.

  This is the picture I treasure of Henry Thoreau as I saw him in my own house the year before he died.

(Clear Grit, 294-295)
22 May 1862. New Bedford, Mass.

Daniel Ricketson writes in his journal:

  Received a letter from Sophia Thoreau relating to the death of her brother (Daniel Ricketson and His Friends, 321).
22 November 1839. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Linnaeus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his “comb” and “spare shirt,” “leather breeches,” and “gauze cap to keep off gnats,” with as much complacency as Buonaparte would a park of artillery to be used in the Russian Campaign. His eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird, quadruped and biped. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable. These facts have even a novel interest.
(Journal, 1:95-96)
22 November 1848. Salem, Mass.

Thoreau delivers a lecture on “Student Life in New England, its Economy” at Lyceum Hall for the Salem Lyceum (“Student Life in New England, its Economy”; Historical Sketch of the Salem Lyceum, 50).

22 November 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Saw E. Hosmer this afternoon making a road for himself along a hillside (I being on my way to Saw Mill Brook). He turned over a stone, and I saw under it many crickets and ants still lively, which had gone into winter quarters there apparently . . .

  As I returned through Hosmer’s field, the sun was setting just beneath a black cloud by which it had been obscured, and as it had been a cold and windy afternoon, its light, which fell suddenly on some white pines between me and it, lighting them up like a shimmering fire, and also on the oak leaves and chestnut stems, was quite a circumstance.

(Journal, 3:128-129)
22 November 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  P.M.—Up river by boat.

  I think it must be the white lily root I find gnawed by the rats, though the leaves are pellucid. It has large roots with eyes and many smaller rootlets attached . . .

  If there is any one with whom we have a quarrel, it is most likely that that one makes some just demand on us which we disappoint.

(Journal, 5:515-516)

Thoreau also writes to Francis H. Underwood:

Dear Sir,

  If you will inform me in season at what rate per page, (describing the page) you will pay for accepted articles,—returning the rejected within a reasonable time—and your terms are satisfactory, I will forward something for your Magazine before Dec 5th, and you shall be at liberty to put my name in the list of contributors.

Yours

Henry D. Thoreau.

“In the summer and fall of 1853, Underwood wrote to numerous literary men of New England in an attempt to round up literary material for a projected antislavery magazine to be issued by the Boston publisher John P. Jewett. Jewett had already made his name and had begun to make his fabulous profits the year before out of one item, Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 306)
22 November 1854. New York, N.Y.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Left at 7.30 A. M. for New York, by boat to Tacony and rail via Bristol, Trenton, Princeton (near by), New Brunswick. Rahway. Newark. etc. Uninteresting, except the boat . . .

  Went to Crystal Palace; admired the houses on Fifth Avenue . . . Saw [Horace] Greeley; Snow, the commercial editor of the Tribune; Solon Robertson; Fry, the musical critic, etc.; and others. Greeley carried me to the new opera-house, where I heard Grisi and her troupe . . . Greeley appeared to know and to be known by everybody; was admitted free to the opera, and we were led by a page to various parts of the house at different times. Saw at Museum some large flakes of cutting arrowhead stone made into a sort of wide cleavers, also a hollow stone tube, probably from mounds.

(Journal, 7:75-76)

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