Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/128

 10. The allusion here is doubtless to Thoreau's intimate companion of forty years from early in 1843, Ellery Channing, who in the winter of 1843-44 was chopping cordwood on the road from Concord to Lincoln, near where Thoreau and his friend, Stearns Wheeler of Lincoln, had a cabin in the woods for study and amusement. Channing's experiences that winter gave occasion to the making of a poem, The Woodman, which gave title to his third book of verses, published in 1849 (the year when The Week came out) and was reprinted in 1902, with omissions and additions, from the Channing MSS. in Poems of Sixty-Five Years. Thoreau himself had some times been a wood-cutter; indeed, his range of manual employments, as he wrote his Harvard Class Secretary in 1847, made him "a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a House-painter), a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-maker, a etc."

In a letter to Horace Greeley, of May, 1848, Thoreau said that he had supported himself by manual labor at a dollar a day for the past five years, and yet had seen more leisure than most scholars found. He added, "There is no reason why the scholar, who professes to be a little wiser than the mass of men, should not do his work in the dirt occasionally, and by means of his superior wisdom make much less suffice for him. A wise man will not be