10
Thoreau to Hecker.
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.
(Subjoined note, apparently in Hecker's handwriting:—"The proposition made to Thoreau was to take nothing with us, work our passage across the Atlantic, and so through England, France, Germany and Italy. I. T. H.")
It was not permitted the youthful enthusiasts to "compare notes at last." From that hour their paths widely diverged. In a twelvemonth the Atlantic, and more than the Atlantic, lay between them. The novitiate had joined the order of the Redemptorist Fathers at St. Trond in Belgium; and the hermit, "the bachelor of thought and Nature," as Emerson calls him, was in his cabin on the wooded shore of Walden Pond. Neither ever looked back, and it is doubtful if they ever met again. The ardent propagandist did indeed pursue Thoreau, as he pursued Curtis, with kindly-meant letters of fervent appeal to enter with him the labyrinth of, the Catholic Church; but he might as well have called after a wild deer in the forest or an eagle in the upper air.
