Page:Unpublished poems by Bryant and Thoreau.djvu/36

 Maine, where Mr. Bixby found it in 1906, along with later verses unknown to the public, which appeared in The Bibliophile Society's recent Thoreau publication.

The poetical product of Thoreau's youth was much larger than he ever allowed to appear in print; nor did the whole of it fall into the hands of his literary executors,—his sister Sophia, Emerson, Ellery Channing, Harrison Blake, E. H. Russell and myself. I name these six persons, because all of us have, first or last, had a hand in the work of presenting his writings to the public. To these might be added Mr. Henry Salt, his English biographer, who edited in London the only collection of his poems aiming at completeness which has yet appeared. Several persons aided Mr. Salt in this collection, notably, Mr. Blake, myself and Miss Anna Ward, of Spenser, Mass. But none of these eight persons ever had all Thoreau's verses in hand, or even within their knowledge. Sophia Thoreau may possibly be the exception, but I doubt it.

F. B. Sanborn