Thoreau, Henry David | An essay fragment sent to Harrison Gray Otis Blake

Thoreau, Henry David

Autograph manuscript titled "Love", September 1852 

Two pages on one leaf (238 x 174 mm), written recto and verso, blue paper; short closed tear at right edge, old folds, minor staining to left edge. In full morocco album, marbled endpapers, with engraved portrait of Thoreau and transcription of the manuscript.

An undated fragment from a miscellaneous essay on the transcendent unity of wisdom and love

On 23 September, 1852, Thoreau sent this essay along with a letter to Harrison Gray Otis Blake prior to his marriage to Nancy Conant, stating “Mr. Blake,—Here come the sentences which I promised you. You may keep them, if you will regard and use them as the disconnected fragments of what I may find to be a completer essay, on looking over my journal, at last, and may claim again”.

The fragment states, "What the essential difference between man and woman is that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactorily answered. Perhaps we must acknowledge the justness of the distinction which assigns to man the spark of wisdom, and to woman that of love, though neither belongs exclusively to either. Man is continually saying to woman—Why will you not be more wise? Woman is continually saying to man—Why will you not be more loving? It is not in their wit to be wise or to be loving, but unless each is both wise and loving, there can neither be wisdom nor love. All transcendent goodness is one, though appreciated in different ways or by different senses. In beauty we see it, in music we hear it, in fragrance we scent it, in the palatable the pure palate tastes it and in rare health the whole body feels it. The variety is in surface or manifestation, but the radical identity we fail to express. The lover sees in the glance of his beloved the same beauty that in the sunset paints the western skies. It is the same daimon, here lurking under a human eye-lid and there under the closing eye-lids of the day. Here in small compass is the ancient and natural beauty of evening and morning. What loving astronomer has ever fathomed the etherial [sic] depths of the eye?”

REFERENCE

Hudspeth, et al., The Correspondence of Henry D. Thoreau Volume 2, 122

PROVENANCE

Susan Jaffe Tane (bookplate on pastedown endpaper)