Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/28

 the earlier Journals, and the handwriting and some other circumstances about the three drafts of the sketch fix the date as not later than 1844. His poetical scrapbook, into which he copied most of those verses of Ralegh's and Ben Jonson s time that appear in The Week, along with many others, and which Ellery Channing had before him in writing his Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, opens with three pages copied from the works of Ralegh, and contains in its pages, 130-142, the poetic pieces ascribed to Ralegh in this sketch. It was this commonplace book that Thoreau used in preparing his Week for the press in 1848-49, and nothing appears there of later date. The last extracts therein which can be certainly dated are from the Massachusetts Quarterly Review of September, 1848, on Hindoo Philosophy. The paging of the book in pencil is later, and so is a list of pages which shows what therein Thoreau had used in his papers for printing. The long passages about Alexander and Epaminondas are in the scrap-book at pages 236-7; and that fine passage about