Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/169

 &r. 27.] CHANNING TO THOREAU: 145

since I arrived here ; I do not mean the Pencil line, but the Staten Island line, having been there once, to walk on a beach by the tele graph, but did not visit the scene of your do minical duties. Staten Island is very distant from No. 30 Ann Street. I saw polite William Emerson in November last, but have not caught any glimpse of him since then. I am as usual suffering the various alternations from agony to despair, from hope to fear, from pain to pleas ure. Such wretched one-sided productions as you know nothing of the universal man; you may think yourself well off.

That baker, Hecker, who used to live on two crackers a day, I have not seen ; nor Black, nor Vethake, nor Danesaz, nor Rynders, nor any of Emerson s old cronies, excepting James, a lit tle fat, rosy Swedenborgian amateur, with the look of a broker, and the brains and heart of a Pascal. William Charming, I see nothing of him ; he is the dupe of good feelings, and I have all-too-many of these now. I have seen something of your friends, Waldo and Tappan, and have also seen our good man McKean, the keeper of that stupid place, the Mercantile Library.

Acting on Channing s hint, and an old fancy of his own, Thoreau, in the summer of 1845,