Page:Some unpublished letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau; a chapter in the history of a still-born book.djvu/23

 letter to the Concord "loafer" is introduced to show that although his first book was 'despised and rejected' of men, Thoreau had the assurances that are always vouchsafed to the solitary thinker, and these from sources so diverse as Oxford University, justly proud of the achievements of its scholars, and the primeval oak forest of a remote young State,—a raw settlement, as it had been called only fifty years before. It is not whence the apprehension, the agreement, the assent; it is who agrees, assents, and by the cordial handgrasp conveys