Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/172

 148 GOLDEN AGE OF ACHIEVEMENT. [1846,

My pen has been necessarily unproductive in the continued motion of the sphere in which I have lately been moved. You, I suppose, have not passed the winter to the world s unprofit.

You never have seen, as I have, the book with a preface of 450 pages and a text of 60. My letter is like unto it.

I have only to add that your letter of the 26th February did its work, and that I submit to you cordial thanks for the same.

Yours truly,

CHAS. LANE.

I hope to hear occasionally of your doings and those of your compeers in your classic ploughings and diggings.

To HENRY D. THOBEAU, Concord Woods.

Thoreau s letters to Lane have not come into any editor s hands. In England, before Lane s discovery by Alcott, in 1842, he had been the editor of the &quot; Mark-Lane Gazette &quot; (or some thing similar), which gave the price-current of wheat, etc., in the English markets. Emerson found him in Hampstead, London, in February, 1848, and wrote to Thoreau : &quot; I went last Sun day, for the first time, to see Lane at Hamp stead, and dined with him. He was full of