date, portions of several seasons, especially summers, I spent at a
secluded haunt down in Camden county, New Jersey--Timber creek, quite
a little river (it enters from the great Delaware, twelve miles
away)--with primitive solitudes, winding stream, recluse and woody
banks, sweet-feeding springs, and all the charms that birds, grass,
wild-flowers, rabbits and squirrels, old oaks, walnut trees, &c., can
bring. Through these times, and on these spots, the diary from page 76
onward was mostly written.

The COLLECT afterwards gathers up the odds and ends of whatever pieces
I can now lay hands on, written at various times past, and swoops all
together like fish in a net.

I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering, first, from that
eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all
Nature, authors included; second, to symbolize two or three specimen
interiors, personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the
middle range of the Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange,
unloosen'd, wondrous time. But the book is probably without any
definite purpose that can be told in a statement.


ANSWER TO AN INSISTING FRIEND

You ask for items, details of my early life--of genealogy and
parentage, particularly of the women of my ancestry, and of its
far-back Netherlands stock on the maternal side--of the region where
I was born and raised, and my mother and father before me, and theirs
before them--with a word about Brooklyn and New York cities, the times
I lived there as lad and young man. You say you want to get at these