Excerpt from Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books Through the kindness of relatives and friends of the Thoreau family, there have been loaned for this volume some letters and diaries hitherto guarded from the public. Interviews have also been granted by a few surviving friends of Henry and Sophia Thoreau, who have now first given utterance to certain anecdotes and impressions. To Professor E. Harlow Russell, the present executor of the Tho reau manuscripts, thanks are especially due for generous encouragement and permission to photo graph certain pages of the journals. The aim of this volume has been, not alone to embody the facts, recondite and familiar, in Thoreau's life and environment, but also to estimate his rank and services as naturalist and author, judged by the comparative standards of this new century. In illustrative quotations from Thoreau's own pages, the purpose has been to choose less familiar pas sages, for a careful study of his writings has dis covered many overlooked and self-revelatory sentences. With full recognition of the inadeqilacy of the result, this study has yet proved a stimulant to research and soul-uplift unequaled in many years of literary work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.