Page:Some unpublished letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau; a chapter in the history of a still-born book.djvu/40

, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.'

"In my next excursion—that journey made with closed eyes and folded hands; hands not kid-gloved; bare hands to lay hold on the realities beyond this Vanity Fair that we in our ignorance call 'Life.'

"Of a truth, Lowell, a clergyman's son, could not read the simple chart by which the son of the Concord pencil-maker shaped his course amidst the sunken rocks of Conventionality."

But the ex-professor's foibles are making us forget the pen-and-ink interlineations that are yet awaiting their explanations.

"I did not imagine," said the ex-professor on the morning after his lecture on the Letters, "that any but