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[In pencil] Ben Marston Watson (p363 of the Letters) Feby 5
My dear Mr Sanborn
I am very much obliged to you for the advanced sheets. Those times were the most interesting to me, and every word that relates to them seems so vital to me! Then were laid the foundations of modern New England. I was just buying Hillside and planning the new life. are the minor accidents in the Emerson-
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Thoreau life are very important because they bring out the human & family side of their lives which to some people it never seem they lacked. It seems funny to be building once more Mrs Brown's house. Every incident in its early life being so familiar to Mrs Watson & myself. Mrs B was a great spur to Thoreau - the building of her house Mr Emerson's chief friend. You should have seen him when he first came from Europe, reading in the
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Lyceum his lectures on Italy like a good boy, religion and philosophy being taboed. [sic] The poor man hardly knew what to preach about for a while, but preach he must. He never failed to read everything he wrote in Plymouth from the first, especially after he began to feel the attraction of Venus. Fortunately for us he had several very strong friends in P. from the earliest period. I heard everything. I was 12 yrs old when he first appeared above the horizon. The first
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time I remember him in my fathers house was in 1832 when Wm. Goodwin was a baby - he knew what a beautiful voice that boy had.
You might trust our father's intermaxillary bone -I think he was more proud of that than of anything else -and he was always as you say, more proud of his science than of his poetry. He had the prophetic mind - and also the story of the Siege of Paris. Yours, Ben Marston
