Emerson added his briefer and equally pointed commendation to Dr. Ripley's[1]
- ↑ Dr. Ripley wrote:
Concord, May 1, 1838.
To the Friends of Education:—The undersigned very cheerfully hereby introduces to public notice the bearer, Mr. David Henry Thoreau, as a teacher in the higher branches of useful literature. He is a native of this town, and a graduate of Harvard University. He is well disposed and well qualified to instruct the rising generation. His scholarship and moral character will bear the strictest scrutiny. He is modest and mild in his disposition and government, but not wanting in energy of character, and fidelity in
two weeks' tour in Maine, this verse appears among the fragments preserved:
How long I slept I know not, but at last
I felt my consciousness returning fast;
For Zephyr rustled past with leafy tread,
And heedlessly with one heel grazed my head.
In this Maine journey, mentioned above, Thoreau went on May 3 from Boston to Portland by boat; thence by coach to Bath and Brunswick. May 7 he went to Augusta by Gardiner and Hallowell; meeting at the latter an old English gentleman, of whom he says: "Though I peered into his eyes, I could not discern myself in them. He walked and fluttered like a strange bird at my side."
May 8, Thoreau went to Bangor and Oldtown; then after a visit to his cousins at Bangor, he went to Belfast May 11, and thence by sailboat, May 13, to Castine; and May 17 he returned by boat to Boston and Concord, without having found any school in want of a teacher like himself. Like the good Dr. Ripley, who gave him a certificate of fitness for teaching, the Maine committees must have had "their eyesight much impaired," not to recognize Thoreau's qualifications; though his personal aspect at that time was not very attractive, far less so than his brother John's.
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