superiority of character
which addrest all men with a native authority.

His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to
trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity
which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished.
Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a
disgust for crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He detected
paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in
beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his
dealing that his admirers called him "that terrible Thoreau," as if he
spoke when silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think
the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy
sufficiency of human society.

The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance
inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of
antagonism defaced his earlier writings--a trick of rhetoric not quite
outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and
thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter
forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find
sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and
Paris. "It was so dry that you might call it wet."

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in
the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic
to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To
him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the
Atlantic a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to
cosmical laws. Tho he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain
chronic assumption that the science of the day pretended
completeness, and he had just found out that the savants had neglected
to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to describe
the seeds or count the sepals. "That is to say," we replied, "the
blockheads were not born in Concord; but who said they were? It was
their unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome;
but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they
never saw Bateman's Pond, or Nine-acre Corner, or Becky Stow's Swamp.
Besides, what were you sent into the world for but to add this
observation?"

Had this genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his
life, but with his energy and practical ability he