age there was a tree of wondrous growth, the shadow of
which--alas, too frequently--was the only part they were allowed to
touch. Emerson was one of these. He was not only deeply conscious of
Thoreau's rare gifts but in the Woodland Notes pays a tribute to a side
of his friend that many others missed. Emerson knew that Thoreau's
sensibilities too often veiled his nobilities, that a self-cultivated
stoicism ever fortified with sarcasm, none the less securely because it
seemed voluntary, covered a warmth of feeling. "His great heart, him a
hermit made." A breadth of heart not easily measured, found only in the
highest type of sentimentalists, the type which does not perpetually
discriminate in favor of mankind. Emerson has much of this sentiment
and touches it when he sings of Nature as "the incarnation of a
thought," when he generously visualizes Thoreau, "standing at the
Walden shore invoking the vision of a thought as it drifts heavenward
into an incarnation of Nature." There is a Godlike patience in
Nature,-in her mists, her trees, her mountains--as if she had a more
abiding faith and a clearer vision than man of the resurrection and
immortality! There comes to memory an old yellow-papered composition of
school-boy days whose peroration closed with "Poor Thoreau; he communed
with nature for forty odd years, and then died." "The forty odd
years,"--we'll still grant that part, but he is over a hundred now, and
maybe, Mr. Lowell, he is more lovable, kindlier, and more radiant with
human sympathy today, than, perchance, you were fifty years ago. It may
be that he is a far stronger, a far greater, an incalculably greater
force in the moral and spiritual fibre of his fellow-countrymen
throughout the world today than you dreamed of fifty years ago. You,
James Russell Lowells! You, Robert Louis Stevensons! You, Mark Van
Dorens! with your literary perception, your power of illumination, your
brilliancy of expression, yea, and with your love of sincerity, you
know your Thoreau, but not my Thoreau--that reassuring and true friend,
who stood by me one "low" day, when the sun had gone down, long, long
before sunset. You may know something of the affection that heart
yearned for but knew it a duty not to grasp; you may know something of
the great human passions which stirred that soul--too deep for animate
expression--you may know all of this, all there is to know about
Thoreau, but you know him not, unless you love him!

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