5
In his ripest years, in his most considered utterance, he does but reiterate in substance the declaration of these letters when he says, in that masterpiece of his essays, "Life without Principle" — "I have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a doubtful compliment this is to pay me! As if he had met me half-way across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and proposed to me to go along with him! If I did, what do you think the underwriters would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age I embarked."
On Hecker's side there was undoubtedly far less of serious purpose ; his mood seems youthful, almost boyish; but the glow of it is genuine and characteristic, and I think his biographer, Father Elliott, misses its import when he turns the affair off lightly as "but one of the diversions with which certain souls, not yet enlightened as to their true course, nor arrived at the abandonment of themselves to Divine Providence, are amused." To my mind, these two letters of Hecker's clearly reveal the temperament, at once impetuous and volatile, that went with the man through his troubled life and gave him much of his influence and distinction, as well as cast him oft-times into the fire and oft into the water.
But it is time to let the correspondence speak for itself.
Hecker to Thoreau.
- Henry Thoreau:
It was not altogether the circumstance of our immediate physical nearness, though this may have [been] the consequence of a higher affinity, that inclined us to commune with each other. This I am fully sensible [of]
