Page:A Bit of Unpublished Correspondence Between Henry D. Thoreau and Isaac T. Hecker.djvu/2

 A BIT OF UNPUBLISHED CORRESPONDENCE

BETWEEN HENRY D. THOREAU AND

ISAAC T. HECKER.

first thought, and in the light of later years, which revealed such a wide difference in the characters and careers of these two remarkable men, it seems surprising that Henry Thoreau and Isaac Hecker could ever have got into any personal relation whatever. But at the time of this little correspondence they were both young; and youth, no less than misery, acquaints us sometimes with strange bedfellows. To be sure, both were ardent idealists, both were frank and sincere, both of high and knightly courage. Their armor was their honest thought, and simple truth their utmost skill. This must have been the ground of such sympathy as existed between them.

Hecker at this time had just spent the best part of a year in the spring-morning atmosphere of Brook Farm, then in its prime, where his genial and attaching disposition had won him not a few admiring friends, among whom was George William Curtis, who named the aspiring enthusiast "Ernest the Seeker"; and now, with his eager but somewhat irresolute hand in the strong grasp of Orestes Brownson, the youth was being half-led, half-impelled from within, toward the Catholic Church. He had recently been for some months a lodger in the house of Thoreau's mother at Concord, while taking lessons in Latin and Greek of George Bradford, whose rare worth as a teacher he had learned at Brook Farm. That was how his acquaintance with Thoreau came about. His studies, however, always