Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/169



ADDENDUM

the preceding pages of this volume were printed, Mr. Bixby has acquired a number of other unpublished MSS. of Thoreau, recently discovered among the papers of the Thatcher family, mostly dating from the years before 1845. For many years they remained in obscurity with these distant relatives of Thoreau, to whom they had been left by his sister Sophia at her death. She gave most of her brother's papers to Mr. Blake, who left them as a heritage to Mr. E. H. Russell, of Worcester, Mass.; but it appears that for some reason she wished to keep these particular MSS. in the family, and so left them with the Thatchers, with whom she was staying at the time of her death. Some of these contain poems quoted in part in The Week in 1849; and several of these poems are first drafts, or more complete forms of those [121]