ho shunned vain cares and vainer strife
Found an eternity in one short life.

[Illustration: HENRY THOREAU]

As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre
individual. Those who stand out before a groping world as beacon-lights
were men of great faults and unequal performances. It is quite needless
to add that they do not live on account of their faults or
imperfections, but in spite of them.

Henry David Thoreau's place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer
and more secure as the seasons pass; his life proves for us again the
paradoxical fact that the only men who really succeed are those who
fail.

Thoreau's obscurity, his poverty, his lack of public recognition in
life, either as a writer or lecturer, his rejection as a lover, his
failure in business, and his early death, form a combination of
calamities that make him as immortal as a martyr. Especially does an
early death sanctify all and make the record complete, but the death of
a naturalist while right at the height of his ability to see and
enjoy--death from tuberculosis of a man who lived most of the time in
the open air--these things array us on the side of the man 'gainst
unkind Fate, and cement our sympathy and love.

Nature's care forever is for the species, and the individual is
sacrificed without ruth that the race may live and progress. This dumb
indifference of Nature to the individual--this apparent contempt for the
man--seems to prove that the individual is only a phenomenon. Man is
merely a manifestation, a symptom, a symbol, and his quick passing
proves that he isn't the Thing. Nature does not care for him--she
produces a million beings in order to get one who has thoughts--all are
swept into the dustpan of oblivion but the one who thinks; he alone
lives, embalmed in the memories of generations unborn.

One of the most insistent errors ever put out was that statement of
Rousseau, paraphrased in part by T. Jefferson, that all men are born
free and equal. No man was ever born free, and none are equal, and would
not remain so an hour, even if Jove, through caprice, should make them
so.

The Thoreau race is dead. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord there is
a monument marking a row of mounds where a half-dozen Thoreaus rest. The
inscriptions are all of one size, but the name of one alone lives, and
he lives because he had thoughts and expressed them. If any of the tribe
of Thoreau gets into Elysium, it wi