Page:A Bit of Unpublished Correspondence Between Henry D. Thoreau and Isaac T. Hecker.djvu/3

4 fitful and against the grain, had suddenly come to an end, smothered as it were or at least displaced by one of those high tides of inward unrest which visited him at intervals throughout his life. He had gone home to New York and prepared himself for baptism into the Church which appears to have been his destiny quite as much as his choice, when the notion came to him of the adventurous trip to Europe proposed to Thoreau on the spur of the moment in these letters.

This was in 1844, when Hecker was twenty-five. Thoreau, two years his senior, had graduated at Harvard seven years before, had taught school a little, and had tried his hand with effect at literary work. He too, like Hecker, was nearing a crisis in his life; namely, the hermit episode at Walden. For although that "experiment," as he himself called it (for Thoreau knew what he was about), lasted in its original form but little more than two years, it was distinctly the point of departure of his career, and laid out the course from which he never afterwards swerved.

The significance of this correspondence, slight as it is in form and manifestly unstudied in its content, lies in a certain prophetic note, all the more impressive from its unconsciousness, which especially in the case of Thoreau discloses the clearness of his self-knowledge and the consistency and firmness of his self-determination. Curtis, writing of young Hecker as he knew him at Brook Farm, says, "There was nothing ascetic or severe in him, but I have often thought since that his feeling was probably what he might have afterward described as a consciousness that he must be about his Father's business." While such a feeling is but vaguely if at all expressed in his two letters to Thoreau, it constitutes the very core and essence of Thoreau's response. Young as the latter was, unengaged as be seemed even to his intimate friend Channing (his best biographer), he had already heard and heeded the call of his Genius, and his vocation was thenceforth fixed.