Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/20

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

in the Concord home. The second draft is also fragmentary, but covers "Sunday" and "Tuesday," which are omitted from the other, and contains many passages that he left out, or materially changed, when making his final copy for Munroe to print,—at the author's cost. This third and final draft, which would be very precious to collectors if extant, was probably destroyed as waste paper by the printers, or went to the paper-mill to be refashioned into sheets for other scribes. The present editor has followed mainly the first of these two tentative drafts, because it contains more unprinted matter; but he has also occasionally used passages from the second draft, which were omitted in printing the volume of 1849. Thus the charming portrayal of "a natural Sabbath,—a celestial day" in The Week (page 56), goes on in this second draft:

"The air was as elastic and crystalline as if it were a glass to the picture of the world, and explained the artifice of the picture-dealer, who does not regard his picture as finished until it is glassed. It was like the landscape seen through the bottom of a tum-

[xii]