seemed born for
great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his
rare powers of action that I can not help counting it a fault in him
that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all
America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is
good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the
end of years, it is still only beans!

But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the
incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its
defeats with new triumphs. His study of nature was a perpetual
ornament to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the
world through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They possest every
kind of interest.

He had many elegances of his own, while he scoffed at conventional
elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the
grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in
the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and he
remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a
slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain
plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond lily, then the gentian,
and the _Mikania scandens_, and "life-everlasting," and a bass-tree which
he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought
the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight--more oracular and
trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what it concealed from the other
senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they
were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature
so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of
cities, and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with
man and his dwelling. The ax was always destroying his forest. "Thank God,"
he said, "they can not cut down the clouds!"....

The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require
longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance.
The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it
has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his
broken task, which none else can finish--a kind of indignity to so
noble a soul, that it should depart out of Nature before yet he has
been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is
con