Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/172

148 dollars for the article on Carlyle,—excellent prices for those days. An exhaustive and just study of nature requires not alone familiarity with forest and meadow, but also with sea and shore. For this purpose he made the excursions of 1849, 1850, and 1855, recorded in "Cape Cod," portions of which appeared in Putnam's Magazine before Thoreau died. Another expedition destined to play an important part in his literary remains was to Canada in 1850 with Channing, when they styled themselves the "Knights of the Umbrella and the Bundle." In his letters and journals for 1847 to 1850 are sundry suggestions of the slow, yet sure, appreciation which was coming to Thoreau as a man of thought and literary ability, namely, invitations to lecture before lyceums and smaller audiences. In his first day-book is mention of his primal attempt at such lecture before the Concord Lyceum in 1838. Occasional mention is made of writing lectures during 1840 to 1845, but one can well understand that his radical and fearless utterances on church and state would disqualify him for any cautious lyceum during these years of conflict over slavery. The restriction on the lyceum seems to have been circumvented in Plymouth, as it was elsewhere, by arranging special services on Sundays, for the