tries did not appear at all in the discourse; others were abridged or expanded, and most of them were varied in literary expression before appearing in The Dial, or afterward in The Week. A comparison of the three forms of the same criticism will throw light (as all the extracts from destroyed journals will, when compared with the finished page as Thoreau printed it) on his method of working. The passages here given will be found to differ from the same description or meditation elsewhere published, and the difference will usually be due to alterations made later by the author; but now and then, perhaps, to the difficulty experienced in reading his hasty chirography, often in faint penciling, and without much care in arrangement or punctuation.
The date of the passages on Love and Friendship and on Conversation cannot be fixed with certainty, but all were written before The Week was published in 1849, and most of them years before that.
Thoreau did not reach the age of thirty until July 1847, and most of the passages of affectionate sentiment were certainly written
[xxix]
