"'Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill,
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heared,' etc.
"'But O, the heavy change,' now he is gone. The Channing you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together! You will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left for you to solve it. I suspect that the most that you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,—to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read his poems. That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,—take hold of that. Review them if you can,—perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing. He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. He will ever be 'reserved and enigmatic,' and you must deal with him at arm's length. I have no secrets to tell you concerning him, and do not wish to call obvious excellences and defects by far-fetched names. Nor need I suggest how witty and poetic he is,—and what an inexhaustible fund of good-fellowship you will find in him."
In the record of his winter visitors at Walden, Thoreau had earlier made mention of Channing, who then lived on Ponkawtasset Hill, two or three miles away from the hermitage.
"He who came from farthest to my lodge," says Thoreau, "through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher may be daunted, but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours; even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with boisterous mirth, and resound with the murmur of much sober talk,—making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest."
In his "Week," as Thoreau floats down the Concord, past the Old Manse, he commemorates first Hawthorne and then Channing, saying of the latter,—
"On Ponkawtasset, since, with such delay,
Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,
A poet wise hath settled whose fine ray
Doth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day.
Like those first stars, whose silver beams on high,
Shining more brightly as the day goes by,
Most travelers cannot at first descry,
But eyes that wont to range the evening sky."
These were true and deserved compliments, but they availed little (no more than did the praises of Emerson in the "Dial," and of Hawthorne in his "Mosses") to make Channing known to the general reader. Some years after Thoreau's death, when writing to another friend, this neglected poet said:—
"Is there no way of disabusing S. of the liking he has for the verses I used to write? You probably know he is my only patron, but that is no reason he should be led astray. There is no other test of the value of poetry, but its popularity. My verses have never secured a single reader but S. He really believes, I think, in those so-called verses; but they are not good,—they are wholly unknown and unread, and always will be. Mediocre poetry is worse than nothing,—and mine is not even mediocre. I have presented S. with the last set of those little books there is, to have them bound, if he will. He can keep them as a literary curio, and in his old age amuse himself with thinking, 'How could ever I have liked these?'"
Yet this self-disparaging poet was he who wrote,—
"If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea,"—