Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/125

 to our quiet town to find homes. The shy Hawthorne went to the Manse, temporarily unoccupied by the Ripley family, and the interesting though perverse genius, William Ellery Channing, with his fair young wife (Margaret Fuller's sister), looking like a Madonna of Raphael's, took a little house on the broad meadow just beyond Emerson's.

Thoreau with friendly courtesy did the honours of the river and the wood to each man in turn, for he held with Emerson that Nature says “One to one, my dear.” Though Channing remained in Concord most of his life, Hawthorne at that time stayed but two years. Thoreau, while a homesick tutor in Staten Island, in a letter to Emerson thus shows that friendship with the new-comers had begun: —

“ — I was very glad to hear your voices from so far. . . . My thoughts revert to those dear hills and