Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/390

 364 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1857,

am could say, or sing, or dance, morning prayers there of some kind.

Please remember me to Mrs. Watson, and to the rest of your family who are helping the sun shine yonder.

TO DANIEL RICKETSON (AT NEW BEDFORD).

CONCORD, August 18, 1857.

DEAR SIR, Your Wilson Flagg 1 seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to hear

nephews, owned the &quot; breezy island &quot; where Thoreau had vis ited his friends (Clark s Island, the only one in Plymouth Bay), had built his own house, &quot; Hillside,&quot; on the slope of one of the hills above Plymouth town, and there laid out a fine park and garden, which Thoreau surveyed for him in the autumn of 1854, Alcott and Mr. Watson carrying the chain. For a de scription of Hillside, see Channing s Wanderer (Boston, 1871) and Alcott s Sonnets and Canzonets (Boston : Roberts, 1882). It was a villa much visited by Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Thoreau, George Bradford, and the Transcendentalists gener ally. Mr. Watson graduated at Harvard two years after Tho reau, and in an old diary says : &quot; I remember Thoreau in the college yard (1836) with downcast thoughtful look intent, as if he were searching for something ; always in a green coat, green because the authorities required black, I suppose.&quot; In a letter he says : &quot; I have always heard the Maiden in the East was Mrs. Watson, Mary Russell Watson, and I sup pose there is no doubt of it. I may be prejudiced, but I have always thought it one of his best things, and I have highly valued his lines. I find in my Dial, No. 6, I have written six new stanzas in the margin of Friendship, and they are num bered to show how they should run. I think Mrs. Brown gave them to me.&quot;

1 A writer on scenery and natural history, who outlived