panionable qualities of this moody poet, though he was keenly conscious of his peculiarities. Professor Russell, who recalls Channing on an occasion of a visit to Concord and an evening at the Old Manse, has spoken of the gracious, inspiring companion that he found in him, on their return walk to the town. In "Walden," Thoreau recounts the visits of this friend, then coming all the distance from the hilltop of Ponkawtasset to the little lodge, where they enjoyed hours of "boisterous mirth" and serious talk and made "many a bran new theory of life over a thin dish of gruel." Channing's memorial verses and biography, no less than his poems, "The Wanderer" and "Near Home," have been among the most tender and illuminating revelations of Thoreau's mind and soul.
The world has ignored the poems of Channing, though they contain many rare thoughts and beautiful images. He carried to a far greater excess the philosophic trend and uneven, independent metres, which characterize the poetry of Emerson and Thoreau, yet he had deeper passion and more absorbing subjectivity than either of his friends. In "A Week," Thoreau refers with discriminating sympathy to the earlier poems of Channing,
