[26] Of the publishing house of Bradbury & Soden, in Boston, which had taken Nathan Hale's Boston Miscellany off his hands, and had published in it, with promise of payment, Thoreau's "Walk to Wachusett." But much time had passed, and the debt was not paid; hence the lack of a "shower of shillings" which the letter laments. Emerson's reply gives the first news of the actual beginning of Alcott's short-lived paradise at Fruitlands, and dwells with interest on the affairs of the rural and lettered circle at Concord.
[27] At Fruitlands with the Alcotts. See Sanborn's Thoreau, p. 137, for this letter.
[28] Emerson also was satisfied with it for once, and wrote to Thoreau: "Our Dial thrives well enough in these weeks. I print W. E. Channing's 'Letters,' or the first ones, but he does not care to have them named as his for a while. They are very agreeable reading."
[29] Afterwards Senator Hoar of Massachusetts, but then in Harvard College.
[30] Henry James, Senior.
[31] Emerson had written, July 20: "I am sorry to say that when I called on Bradbury & Soden, nearly a month ago, their partner, in their absence, informed me that they should not pay you, at present, any part of their debt on account of the Boston Miscellany. After much talking, all the promise he could offer was 'that within a year it would probably be paid,'—a probability which certainly looks very slender. The very worst thing he said was the proposition that you should take your payment in the form of Boston Miscellanies! I shall not fail to refresh their memory at intervals."
[32] It may need to be said that these were New York weeklies—the Mirror, edited in part by N. P. Willis, and the New World by Park Benjamin, formerly of Boston, whose distinction it is to have first named Hawthorne as a writer of genius. "Miss Fuller" was Margaret,—not yet resident in New York, whither she went to live in 1844.
[33] The allusion here is to Ellery Channing's "Youth of the Poet and Painter," in the Dial,—an unfinished autobiography. The Present of W. H. Channing, his cousin, named above, was a short-lived periodical, begun September 15, 1843, and ended in April, 1844. "McKean" was Henry Swasey McKean, who was a classmate of Charles Emerson at Harvard in 1828, a tutor there in 1830-35, and who died in 1857.
[34] This inkstand was presented by Miss Hoar, with a note dated "Boston, May 2, 1843," which deserves to be copied:—
Dear Henry,—The rain prevented me from seeing you the night before I came away, to leave with you a parting assurance of good will and good hope. We have become better acquainted within the two past years than in our whole life as schoolmates and neighbors before; and I am unwilling to let you go away without telling you that I, among your other friends, shall miss you much, and follow you with remembrance and all best wishes and confidence. Will you take this little inkstand and try if it will carry ink safely from Concord to Staten Island? and the pen, which, if you can write with steel, may be made sometimes the interpreter of friendly thoughts to those whom you leave beyond the reach of your voice,—or record the inspirations of Nature, who, I doubt not, will be as faithful to you who trust her in the sea-girt Staten Island as in Concord woods and meadows. Good-by, and εὖ πράττειν, which, a wise man says, is the only salutation fit for the wise.