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THE SERVICE
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
AN unpublished essay by a writer of so richly suggestive a quality as Thoreau, and of so interesting a time as the days of transcendentalism is surely a discovery of some importance to American literature. Such a paper is The Service, a work of Thoreau's early period, written for The Dial but not found sufficiently deferential to conventionalities of style, and too imperious in tone to satisfy Margaret Fuller, the first editor of that periodical. So it happens that the manuscript, long since laid aside unnoticed, now makes its first appearance. Not Nature but Human Life is the author's subject and in a high-phrased fashion, disdainful of the meagre, the commonplace, the cowardly plane of action, he views the possibilities of man, obliterating human distinctions of time and space and presenting the earnest warrior for truth and the high attainments of the soul.
The volume, edited with an Introductory Note by Frank B. Sanborn, will be published about April 1st. It is printed by D. B. Updike at The Merrymount Press,
