The Service

by Henry David Thoreau

THE SERVICE

BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU

EDITED BY F. B. SANBORN

BOSTON

CHARLES E. GOODSPEED

1902

Copyright, 1902, by F. B. Sanborn

 

D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY NOTE		vii
THE SERVICE:
I	QUALITIES OF THE RECRUIT	1
II	WHAT MUSIC SHALL WE HAVE?	11
⁠III	NOT HOW MANY, BUT WHERE THE ENEMY ARE	17
NOTES		29

 

THE SERVICE
[ written about 1840 ]

 

A Limited Edition of five hundred copies of this book was printed on French hand-made paper, and twenty copies on Japan paper, by D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston, in March, 1902. This is copy N^o.

THE SERVICE

BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU

AN unpublished essay by a writer of so richly suggestive a quality as Thoreau, and of so interesting a time as the days of transcendentalism is surely a discovery of some importance to American literature. Such a paper is The Service, a work of Thoreau's early period, written for The Dial but not found sufficiently deferential to conventionalities of style, and too imperious in tone to satisfy Margaret Fuller, the first editor of that periodical. So it happens that the manuscript, long since laid aside unnoticed, now makes its first appearance. Not Nature but Human Life is the author's subject and in a high-phrased fashion, disdainful of the meagre, the commonplace, the cowardly plane of action, he views the possibilities of man, obliterating human distinctions of time and space and presenting the earnest warrior for truth and the high attainments of the soul.

The volume, edited with an Introductory Note by Frank B. Sanborn, will be published about April 1st. It is printed by D. B. Updike at The Merrymount Press,

uniform in style with The Personality of Thoreau, recently published by me. It is issued in a Limited Edition; as follows:

500 copies on toned French hand-made paper, at $2.50 net; 22 copies on Japan paper (of which two copies are for copyright purposes), at $10.00 net.

CHARLES E. GOODSPEED, PUBLISHER,

Number 5^a Park Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

 

D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston