I remember you, as it were, with the whole Catholic Church at your skirts. And the other day, for a moment, I think I understood your relation to that body; but the thought was gone again in a twinkling, as when a dry leaf falls from its stem over our heads, but is instantly lost in the rustling mass at our feet.
I am really sorry that the Genius will not let me go with you, but I trust that it will conduct to other adventures, and so, if nothing prevents, we will compare notes at last.
When this invitation reached Concord, Thoreau was absent on a tour with Channing to the Berkshire Mountains and the Catskills,—Channing coming up the Hudson from New York (where he then lived, aiding Horace Greeley in the Tribune office), and meeting his friend at the foot of the Hoosac Mountain. On its summit Thoreau had spent the night, sleeping under a board near the observatory tower built by the Williams College students, as related by him in the Week. They then crossed the Hudson and journeyed on to the Catskills, returning together to Concord.[107] Meantime Hecker had got impatient, and wrote again, to which Thoreau replied, August 17, thus briefly:—
TO ISAAC HECKER (AT NEW YORK).
I improve the occasion of my mother's sending to acknowledge the receipt of your stirring letter. You have probably received mine by this time. I thank you for not anticipating any vulgar objections on my part. Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home. Who knows whence his education is to come! Perhaps I may drag my anchor at length, or rather, when the winds which blow over the deep fill my sails, may stand away for distant parts,—for now I seem to have a firm ground anchorage, though the harbor is low-shored enough, and the traffic with the natives inconsiderable. I may be away to Singapore by the next tide.
I like well the ring of your last maxim, "It is only the fear of death makes us reason of impossibilities." And but for fear, death itself is an impossibility.
Believe me, I can hardly let it end so. If you do not go soon, let me hear from you again.
Yrs. in great haste,
Henry D. Thoreau.
Hecker did not in fact go to Europe till a year later, and when he walked over a part of central Europe, it was in company with one or two young Catholic priests,—men very unlike Thoreau.
The short correspondence with Calvin Greene (longer than that with Hecker) occurred at intervals, a dozen years and more after the Fruitlands period, when the Walden experience had been lived through and recorded, and the friendship with the Ricketson family was in its earlier stages. Mr. Greene, when he called on me at his first visit to the Thoreau family in 1863, mentioned that he had just read Thoreau's poem, "The Departure," which at Sophia's request I had lately printed in the Boston Commonwealth, a weekly that I had been editing since Moncure Conway had left Concord for London, in the winter of 1862-63. Greene was a plain, sincere man, never in New England before, who amused Channing by saying he had "taken a boat-ride on the Atlantic." He came once more in 1874, and spent an evening with me in the house where Thoreau lived and died,—Mrs. Thoreau then being dead, and Sophia at Bangor, where she died in 1876.