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out in all weathers during his daily excursions, he naturally dressed himself for what he had to do.

As may be inferred from his correspondence with Horace Greeley, Thoreau's whole income from authorship during the twenty years that he practiced that profession, cannot have exceeded a few hundred dollars yearly, — not half enough in most years to supply even his few wants. He would never be indebted to any person pecuniarily, and therefore he found out other ways of earning his subsistence and paying his obligations, gardening, fence - building, white-washing, pencil-making, land-surveyfor he had great mechanical skill, and a patient, conscientious industry in whatever he undertook. When his father, who had been long living in other men's houses, undertook, at last, to build one of his own, Henry worked upon it, and performed no small part of the manual labor. He had no false pride in such matters, was, indeed, rather proud of his workmanship, and averse to the gentility even of his industrious village.

ing, etc.,

During his first residence at Mr. Emer

son's in 1841-43, Thoreau managed the garden and did other hand-work for his friend; and when Mr. Emerson went to England in 1847, he returned to the house (soon after leaving his Walden hut), and took charge of his friend's household affairs in his absence. In a letter to his sister Sophia (October 24, 1847), Thoreau says:—

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I went to Boston the 5th of this month to see Mr. Emerson off to Europe. He sailed in the Washington Irving' packet ship, the same in which Mr. Hedge went before him. Up to this trip, the first mate aboard this ship was, as I hear, one Stephens, a Concord boy, son of Stephens, the carpenter, who used to live above Mr. Dennis. Mr. Emerson's state-room was like a carpeted dark closet, about six feet square, with a large keyhole for a window (the window was about as big as a saucer, and the glass two inches thick), not to mention another skylight overhead in the deck, of the size of an oblong doughnut, and about as opaque. Of course, it would be in vain to look up, if any contemplative promenader put his foot upon it. Such will be his lodgings for two or three weeks; and instead of a walk in Walden woods, he will take a promenade on deck, where the few trees, you know, are stripped of

their bark."

There is a poem of Thoreau's, of uncertain date, called "The Departure,” which, as I suppose, expresses his emotions at leaving finally, in 1848, the friendly house of Emerson, where he had dwelt so long, upon terms of such ideal intimacy. It was never seen by his friends, so far as I can learn, until after his death, when Sophia Thoreau gave it to me, along with other poems, for publication in the " Boston Commonwealth," in 1863. Since then it has been mentioned as a poem written in anticipation of death. This is not so; it was certainly written long before his illness.

"In this roadstead I have ridden,

In this covert I have hidden:
Friendly thoughts were cliffs to me,
And I hid beneath their lea.

"This true people took the stranger,
And warm-hearted housed the ranger;
They received their roving guest,
And have fed him with the best;

"Whatsoe'er the land afforded

To the stranger's wish accorded,
Shook the olive, stripped the vine,
And expressed the strengthening wine.

"And by night they did spread o'er him
What by day they spread before him;

That good will which was repast
Was his covering at last.

"The stranger moored him to their pier

Without anxiety or fear;

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By day he walked the sloping land,

By night the gentle heavens he scanned.

"When first his bark stood inland

To the coast of that far Finland,

Sweet-watered brooks came tumbling to the shore, The weary mariner to restore.

"And still he stayed from day to day,

If he their kindness might repay;

But more and more

The sullen waves came rolling toward the shore.

"And still, the more the stranger waited,

The less his argosy was freighted;

And still the more he stayed,

The less his debt was paid.

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CHAPTER XII.

POET, MORALIST, AND PHILOSOPHER.

THE character of poet is so high and so rare, in any modern civilization, and specially in our American career of nationality, that it behooves us to mark and claim all our true poets, before they are classified under some other name, -as philosophers, naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus Emerson is primarily and chiefly a poet, and only a philosopher in his second intention; and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist by constitution, was inwardly a poet by force of that shaping and controlling imagination, which was his strongest faculty. His mind tended naturally to the ideal side. would have been an idealist in any circumstances; a fluent and glowing poet, had he been born among a people to whom poesy is native, like the Greeks, the Italians, the Irish. As it was, his poetic light illumined

He

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