Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/345

 JET. 38.] TO DANIEL RICKETSON. 321

by Chapman, a royal gift, in the shape of twenty- one distinct works (one in nine volumes, forty-four volumes in all), almost exclusively re lating to ancient Hindoo literature, and scarcely one of them to be bought in America. 1 I am familiar with many of them, and know how to prize them. I send you information of this as I might of the birth of a child.

Please remember me to all your family.

1 These books were ordered by Cholmondeley in London, and sent to Boston just as he was starting- for the Crimean war, in October, 1855, calling them &quot; a nest of Indian books.&quot; They included Mill s History of British India, several transla tions of the sacred books of India, and one of them in Sanscrit ; the works of Bunsen, so far as then published, and other valu able books. In the ndte accompanying this gift, Cholmonde ley said, &quot; I think I never found so much kindness in all my travels as in your country of New England.&quot; In return, Thoreau sent his English friend, in 1857, his own Week, Em erson s poems, Walt Whitman s Leaves of Grass, and F. L. Olmsted s book on the Southern States (then preparing for the secession which they attempted four years later). This was perhaps the first copy of Whitman seen in England, and when Cholmondeley began to read it to his stepfather, Rev. Z. Macaulay, at Hodnet, that clergyman declared he would not hear it, and threatened to throw it in the fire. On reading the Week (he had received Walden from Thoreau when first in America), Cholmondeley wrote me, &quot;Would you tell dear Thoreau that the lines I admire so much in his Week begin thus :

Low-anchored cloud, Newfoundland air, etc.

In my mind the best thing he ever wrote,&quot;