Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/208

 184 GOLDEN AGE OF ACHIEVEMENT. [1848,

ciplined Parthian army, which, as soon as a Ro man soldier would face, retreats on all hands, occasionally firing backwards ; easily routed, not easily subdued, hovering on the skirts of society. Another summer shall not be devoted to the raising of vegetables (Arbors?) which rot in the cellar for want of consumers ; but perchance to the arrangement of the material, the brain- crop which the winter has furnished. I have good talks with him. His respect for Carlyle has been steadily increasing for some time. He has read him with new sympathy and apprecia tion.

I see Channing often. He also goes often to Alcott s, and confesses that he has made a discovery in him, and gives vent to his admira tion or his confusion in characteristic exaggera tion ; but between this extreme and that you may get a fair report, and draw an inference if you can. Sometimes he will ride a broom stick still, though there is nothing to keep him, or it, up but a certain centrifugal force of whim, which is soon spent, and there lies your stick, not worth picking up to sweep an oven with now. His accustomed path is strewn with them. But then again, and perhaps for the most part, he sits on the Cliffs amid the lichens, or flits past on noiseless pinion, like the barred owl in the daytime, as wise and unobserved. He