Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/69

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ÆT. 24.]
TO MRS. LUCY BROWN.
45

vantage at last,—as I am sure I shall, though I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service.

Don't attach any undue seriousness to this threnody, for I love my fate to the very core and rind, and could swallow it without paring it, I think. You ask if I have written any more poems? Excepting those which Vulcan is now forging, I have only discharged a few more bolts into the horizon,—in all, three hundred verses,—and sent them, as I may say, over the mountains to Miss Fuller, who may have occasion to remember the old rhyme:—

"Three scipen gode
Comen mid than flode
Three hundred cnihten."

But these are far more Vandalic than they. In this narrow sheet there is not room even for one thought to root itself. But you must consider this an odd leaf of a volume, and that volume

Your friend,
Henry D. Thoreau.


TO MRS. LUCY BROWN (AT PLYMOUTH).

Concord, October 5, 1841.

Dear Friend,—I send you Williams's[1] letter as the last remembrancer to one of those "whose acquaintance he had the pleasure to

  1. I. T. Williams, who had lived in Concord, but now wrote from Buffalo, N. Y.