letter to the Concord "loafer" is introduced to show that although his first book was 'despised and rejected' of men, Thoreau had the assurances that are always vouchsafed to the solitary thinker, and these from sources so diverse as Oxford University, justly proud of the achievements of its scholars, and the primeval oak forest of a remote young State,—a raw settlement, as it had been called only fifty years before.[1] It is not whence the apprehension, the agreement, the assent; it is who agrees, assents, and by the cordial handgrasp conveys
- ↑ "At Ypsilanti I picked up an Ann Arbor newspaper. It was badly printed, but its contents were good; and it could happen nowhere out of America that so raw a settlement as that at Ann Arbor, where there is difficulty in procuring decent accommodations, should have a newspaper."
Harriet Martineau. Society in America.
