Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/323

 asT.37.] THOREAU IN CAMBRIDGE. 299

one clay making his occasional call at the Har vard College Library (where he found and was allowed to take away volumes relating to his manifold studies), when it occurred to him to call at my student-chamber in Holworthy Hall, and there leave a copy of his &quot; Week.&quot; I had never met him, and was then out ; the occasion of his call was a review of his two books that had come out a few weeks earlier in the &quot; Har vard Magazine,&quot; of which I was an editor and might be supposed to have had some share in the criticism. The volume was left with my classmate Lymaxi, accompanied by a message that it was intended for the critic in the Maga zine. Accordingly, I gave it to Edwin Morton, who was the reviewer, and notified Thoreau by letter of that fact, and of my hope to see him soon in Cambridge or Concord. 1 To this he replied in a few days as below :

1 I had been visiting- Emerson occasionally for a year or two, and knew Alcott well at this time ; was also intimate with Cholmondeley in the autumn of 1854, but had never seen Tho reau ; a fact which shows how recluse were then his habits. The letter below, and the long one describing 1 his trip to Min nesota, were the only ones I received from him in a friendship of seven years. See Sanborn s Thoreau, pp. 195-200. Edwin Morton was my classmate. See pp. 286, 353, 440.