Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/308

 284 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1854,

near Shrewsbury, which Thomas Cholmondeley inherited, and which remains in his family s pos session since his own death at Florence in 1864. But the letters of the Englishman, recently printed in the &quot; Atlantic Monthly &quot; (December, 1893), show how sincere was the attachment of this ideal friend to the Concord recluse, and how well he read that character which the rest of England, and a good part of America, have been so slow to recognize for what it really was.

Thomas Cholmondeley was the eldest son of Rev. Charles Cowper Cholmondeley, rector of Overleigh, Cheshire, and of a sister to Reginald Heber, the celebrated bishop of Calcutta. He was born in 1823, and brought up at Hodnet, in Shropshire, where his father, a cousin of Lord Delamere, had succeeded his brother-in-law as rector, on the departure of Bishop Heber for India, in 1823. The son was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, a friend, and perhaps pupil of Arthur Hugh Clough, who gave him letters to Emerson in 1854. Years before, after leaving Oxford, he had gone with some relatives to New Zealand, and before coming to New England, he had published a book, &quot; Ultima Thule,&quot; describ ing that Australasian colony of England, where he lived for part of a year. He had previously studied in Germany, and traveled on the Conti nent. He landed in America the first time in