Beschreibung:

Working drafts by Thoreau Boston, 1863 THOREAU, Henry David (1817-1862). Two autograph manuscripts, working drafts from "Life Without Principal" and "Walking," Boston, 1862-1863. Four pages on two leaves, 193 x 247mm and 190 x 237mm, in brown ink, several autograph corrections and insertions in pencil (laid into larger sheets). Bound into the first volume of: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Manuscript edition, limited to 600 sets (this is number 140). 20 volumes, octavo. Modern half morocco gilt (spines a little darkened; volume one with repairs to joints). Two autograph draft manuscripts from Thoreau, both differing substantially from the published versions . The first is from "Life Without Principle," Thoreau's 1863 essay originally published in the Atlantic Monthly which offers his program for a righteous livelihood. He begins by describing a lackluster lecture he recently attended wherein the speaker discussed matters "not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies." The present leaf is a working draft from the end of the essay, where he has turned his attention to politics. He writes in part, "A wise man is as unconscious of the movements in the body politic as he is of the process of digestion or the circulation of the blood in the natural body. These processes are infra human—a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half consciousness of these things going on about me, as a man may become conscious so some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state and so have the dyspepsia as it is called." He continues, "Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society—full of grit and gravel—the 2 political parties are its 2 opposite halves which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia—which expresses itself—you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Our life is not altogether a forgetting—but also, alas, to a great extent, a remembering of that which perchance we should never have been conscious of, certainly not from our waking hours." The second leaf is from "Walking," an essay Thoreau considered one of his seminal works; he described it once as "a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter." Delivered as a lecture in April 1851 and published posthumously in the Atlantic in 1862, it extols immersing oneself in nature, and celebrating the wild and the natural over the civilized and conventional. He writes in part on the present leaf: "The man of the Old World sets out upon his way leaving the high lands of Asia, he descends from nation and station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization..." On the verso, a passage not included in the published version: "The Old World is a mighty oak with stout and sturdy trunk, while America is the slender and flexible palm tree, so dear to this continent of the Old World—if it is allowable to employ here comparisons of their nature—calls to mind the square and solid figure of man; America the lithe shape and delicate form of woman."