Page:Some unpublished letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau; a chapter in the history of a still-born book.djvu/62

 is the acknowledgment of the gift, and what an acknowledgment: "I have a right to tell you that there is no man living upon this earth at present, whose friendship or whose notice I value more than yours."

These men had so much in common. Thoreau also had forsaken the faith of his fathers; but a serener 'pagan' never shattered the shrines of the Saints. He could say, as another of our latter-day renunciants has said, "I need no assurances, I am a man who is preoccupied of his own soul."

Thoreau was too solidly self-centred to need assurances; yet he had become an author, and, being flesh and blood, his heart went out to his book as doth a mother's to her first-born. But howsoever interpenetrated by a conviction, howsoever possessed by