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Concord, Mass., June 2, 1913.
Dear Mr. Crane;
From your letter I am apt to think that, though you have read my edition of the "Familiar Letters of Thoreau, you have not read my original Life of Thoreau in the American Men of Letters series. I had that letter of Channing's before me when writing the Life in 1881, and therein I identified Mumbo Jumbo with H. Greeley, in whose Tribune office Ellery Channing was then a sub-editor, on the recommendations of Margaret Fuller, his sister-in-law. Perhaps, also, you are not familiar with Carlyle in 'Sartor Resartus', which Emerson's friends republished in Boston, before it came out in book form in London. Teufelsdroeckh is the hero of the didactical romance, and Blumine is his first love; the 'Everlasting No', is one of T.'s figurative states of mind. Whether T. in C.'s letter is anything more than a fiction for Channing himself, I cannot say; but he meant to signify that Thoreau, already once disappointed in love, - for Ellen Sewall after John Thoreau's death, married Rev. Joseph Osgood of Cohassett, and spent her after life there, where Thoreau occasionally called on her, - should fall in love again, as Channing did several times.
The citations made by me in the Life, from your letter, are on pages 209-211, and P. 218. I ought to have kept the letter, which went back from me to Harry Blake, from whom it went to Blake's friend Russell of Worcester, who must have sold it with other Thoreau papers in his hands. The best of these, except the invaluable Journals, fell into W. H. Bixby's hands (St Louis) and have since been edited by me (not wholly) in five volumes, privately printed by the Boston Bibliophile Society, - viz. Two Volumes of an enlarged and corrected 'Walden', a short life of Sir Walter Ralegh, and what I called 'The First and last Journeys of Thoreau' in two volumes; the second containing the only extant account of his journey to Minnesota, of which Russell sold the original notes, which I edited.
I have forgotten what satirized friends my initials L. and Z. (used to throw the reader off the track) represented, - I think, Alcott by L. and E. Hosmer by Z. Can you tell me what the real names are?
Truly yours, F. B. Sanborn.
P. S. I am completing a final Life of Thoreau, with an account of his Tory ancestors.
