Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/130

 106 YEARS OF DISCIPLINE. [1843,

but I know this cannot be ; and the Fates, after all, are the accomplishes of our hopes. Yet I do hope that you may find it a worthy struggle, and life seem grand still through the clouds.

What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation ! And we can think of them any time and anywhere, and it costs nothing but the lofty disposition. I cannot tell you the joy your letter gives me, which will not quite cease till the latest time. Let me accompany your finest thought.

I send my love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness I slowly recognize.

HENRY.

TO MBS. THOREAU (AT CONCORD).

STATEN ISLAND, July 7, 1843.

DEAR MOTHER, I was very glad to get your letter and papers. Tell father that circumstan tial letters make very substantial reading, at any rate. I like to know even how the sun shines and garden grows with you. I did not get my money in Boston, and probably shall not at all. Tell Sophia that I have pressed some blossoms of the tulip-tree for her. They look somewhat like white lilies. The magnolia, too, is in blossom here.

Pray, have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord? The air here is filled with their din.