Familiar Letters
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 4 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~140,000 words · 657 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenry David Thoreau. (n.d.). Familiar Letters. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/familiar-letters
- MLAHenry David Thoreau. "Familiar Letters." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/familiar-letters.
- ChicagoHenry David Thoreau. Familiar Letters. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/familiar-letters.
What it is about
Thoreau's correspondence, edited by Sanborn in 1894: the Thoreau who writes to particular people, and who is often warmer than the Thoreau of the books.
Context and history
There are the letters to Emerson, who was his patron and his difficulty; those he wrote to Harrison Blake, a schoolmaster of Worcester who asked him for moral advice and whom Thoreau answered for thirteen years with what amount to small essays; and the family letters. The best-known is the one he wrote to Emerson when Emerson's small son died, which sounds cold until one grasps what it says. Two things are worth remembering: that this is a nineteenth-century edition, made by the standards of its day, and that Sanborn was an editor with a free hand — he cut, combined and sometimes improved — which later scholarship has had to undo.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
It was a happy thought of Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing, himself a poet, to style our Concord hermit the "poet-naturalist;" for there seemed to be no year of his life and no hour of his day when Nature did not whisper some secret in his ear,--so intimate was he with her from childhood. In another connection, speaking of natural beauty, Channing said, "There is Thoreau,--he knows about it; give him sunshine and a handful of nuts, and he has enough." He was also a naturalist in the more customary sense,--one who studied and arranged methodically in his mind the facts of outward nature; a good botanist and ornithologist, a wise student of insects and fishes; an observer of the winds, the clouds, the seasons, and all that goes to make up what we call "weather" and "climate." Yet he was in heart a poet, and held all the accumulated knowledge of more than forty years not so much for use as for delight. As Gray's poor friend West said of himself, "like a clear-flowing stream, he reflected the beauteous prospect around;" and Mother Nature had given Thoreau for his prospect the meandering Indian river of Concord, the woodland pastures and fair lakes by which he dwelt or rambled most of his life. Born in the East Quarter of Concord, July 12, 1817, he died in the village, May 6, 1862; he was there fitted for Harvard College, which he entered in 1833, graduating in 1837; and for the rest of his life was hardly away from the town for more than a year in all. Consequently his letters to his family are few, for he was usually among them; but when separated from his elder brother John, or his sisters Helen and Sophia, he wrote to them, and these are the earliest of his letters which have been preserved. Always thoughtful for others, he has left a few facts to aid his biographer, respecting his birth and early years. In his Journal of December 27, 1855, he wrote:--"Recalled this evening, with th