
I received your noble volume of Works, just in time to make it a Christmas present
from you,—and none could have been more highly valued. I hope it may not be
the final Edition but that you may live to add more prose and verse to the monument
which will preserve your name in the Future, for which you write, and to which you
truly belong. But in the Present and the Past also you have done your work, and thus have gained
a claim on the Future, which will not be denied you.
I cherish two copies of the first edition of your Leaves of Grass—one given me by Emerson in the year it was published, and one left to me by Sophia Thoreau—her brother Henry's copy. I shall place these and your full-grown volume together, and hand them down to my children
I enclose the report of an essay I lately read in New York. The ommitted passage is one about
Emerson which did not properly belong there, and was not read by me,— but the
reporter found it among the sheets which I handed him to use, not to print entire.
