Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/159

 2ET.2G.] TO R. W. EMERSON. 135

longs, whether she will be a fair saint of some Christian order, or a follower of Plato and the heathen? Bid Ellen a good-night or a good- morning from me, and see if she will remember where it comes from ; and remember me to Mrs. Brown, and your mother, and Elizabeth Hoar.

TO R. W. EMERSON (AT CONCORD).

STATEN ISLAND, October 17, 1843.

MY DEAR FRIEND, I went with my pupil to the Fair of the American Institute, and so lost a visit from Tappan, whom I met returning from the Island. I should have liked to hear more news from his lips, though he had left me a letter and the &quot; Dial,&quot; which is a sort of cir cular letter itself. I find Chaniiing s l letters full of life, and I enjoy their wit highly. Lane writes straight and solid, like a guideboard, but I find that I put off the &quot; social tendencies &quot; to a future day, which may never come. He is always Shaker fare, quite as luxurious as his principles will allow. I feel as if I were ready to be appointed a committee on poetry, I have

1 The allusion here is to Ellery Channing s &quot; Youth of the Poet and Painter,&quot; in the Dial an unfinished autobiography. The Present of W. H. Channing 1, his cousin, named above, was a short-lived periodical, begun September 15, 1843, and ended in April, 1844. &quot; McKean &quot; was Henry Swasey McKean, who was a classmate of Charles Emerson at Harvard in 1828, a tutor there in 1830-35, and who died in 1857.