streets and would cling to his hands and clutch
his coat, and ask where the berries grew, or the first spring flowers
were to be found. With children he was particularly patient and kind.
With them he would converse as freely as did George Francis Train with
the children in Madison Square. The children recognized in him something
very much akin to themselves--he would play upon his flute for them and
whittle out toy boats, regardless of the flight of time.

Imbeciles and mental defectives from the almshouse used occasionally to
wander over to his cabin in the woods, and he would treat them with
gentle consideration, and accompany them back home.

His lack of worldly prudence, Blake thought, tokened a courage which
under certain conditions would have made him as formidable as John
Brown. Blake tells this: Once on a lonely road, two miles from Concord,
two loafers stopped a girl who was picking berries, and began to bother
her. Thoreau just then happened along, and seeing the young woman's
distress, he collared the rogues and marched them into the village,
turning them over to that redoubtable transcendentalist, Sam Staples,
who locked them up. Thoreau's hook nose and features could be
transformed in rare instances into a look of command that no man dare
question--it was the look of the fatalist--the benign fanatic--the look
of Marat--the look of a man who has nothing but his life to lose, and
places small store on that. "A little more ambition, and a trifle less
sympathy, and the world would have had a Caesar to deal with," says
Blake.

Cowardice is only caution carried to an extreme. Thoreau exercised no
prudence in making money, securing fame, preserving his health, holding
his friends or making new ones. This Spartan-like quality, that counts
not the cost, is essentially heroic.

But Thoreau was not given to strife; for the most part, he was
non-resistant. The chief thing he prized was equanimity, and this you
can not secure through struggle and strife. His game was all captured
with the spyglass, or carried home in his botanists' drum. For worldly
wealth and what we call progress, he had small appreciation--this marks
his limitations. But his reasons are surely good literature:

They make a great ado nowadays about hard times; but I think that
the community generally, ministers and all, take a wrong view of
the matter. This general failure, both private and public, is
rather occasion for rej