Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/307

 JST. 37.] NEW FRIENDS. 283

by cars to Westminster, and thence 011 foot five or six miles to the mountain-top, where I may engage to meet you, at (or before) 12 M. If the weather is unfavorable, I will try again, on Fri day, and again on Monday. If a storm comes on after starting, I will seek you at the tavern in Princeton centre, as soon as circumstances will permit. I shall expect an answer at once, to clinch the bargain.

The year 1854 was a memorable one in Tho- reau s life, for it brought out his most successful book, &quot; Walden,&quot; and introduced him to the no tice of the world, which had paid small attention to his first book, the &quot;Week,&quot; published five years earlier. This year also made him acquainted with two friends to whom he wrote much, and who loved to visit and stroll with him around Concord, or in more distant places, Thomas Cholmondeley, an Englishman from Shropshire, and Daniel Ricketson, a New Bedford Quaker, of liberal mind _and,., cultivated tastes, an au thor and poet, and fond of corresponding with poets, as he did with the Howitts and William Barnes of England, and with Bryant, Emerson, Channing, and Thoreau, in America. Few of the letters to Cholmondeley are yet found, being buried temporarily in the mass of family papers at Condover Hall, an old Elizabethan mansion