Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/371

 MT. 39.] TO HARRISON BLAKE. 345

tion, to pay for the suns of past summers, for happiness and unhappiness lavished upon you?

Does not Time go by swifter than the swift est equine trotter or racker?

Stir up Brown. Eemind him of his duties, which outrun the date and span of Worcester s years past and to come. Tell him to be sure that he is on the main street, however narrow it may be, and to have a lit sign, visible by night as well as by day.

Are they not patient waiters, they who wait for us ? But even they shall not be Iosers

December 7.

That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I remem ber best the poem of Walt Whitman, an Amer ican, and the Sun-Down Poem. There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagree able, to say the least ; simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to com-