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I am so unfamiliar with this room that I haven't any favorite chair. I'll have to take the nearest, like Thoreau selected his piece of chicken." Then for a few minutes Linda talked frankly. She answered Eugene Snow's every question unhesitatingly and comprehensively.
This connection between life and action affected as we have seen the tone and quality of Elizabethan writing. "All the distinguished writers of the period," says Thoreau, "possess a greater vigour and naturalness than the more modern ... you have constantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked out by implication of the much that was done."
Thoreau was the first man in this country, or in any other, so far as I know, who made a religion of walking the first to announce a Gospel of the Wild. That he went forth into wild nature in much the same spirit that the old hermits went into the desert, and was as devout in his way as they were in theirs, is revealed by numerous passages in his Journal.
From this hour of their first kneeling before the little life in the cabin, something sprang up between Jan Thoreau and John Cummins which it would have been hard for man to break. Looking up after many moments' contemplation of the little Melisse, Jan gazed straight into Cummins' face, and whispered softly the word which in Cree means "father." This was Jan's first word for Melisse.
Thoreau was such a pronounced individualist that he cared for no one but himself, and he cared for himself not at all. It is wife, children and home that teach a man prudence, and make him bank against the storm. "At Walden no one bothered me but the State," said Thoreau.
But I remembered that Thoreau, whose Walden solitude was disturbed by gangs of Irish laborers laying the tracks of this same Fitchburg Railroad, consoled himself with the reflection that hospitable nature made the intruder a part of herself.
Sanborn has read a letter in which he proposed to Thoreau to travel on foot with him in Europe. His real purpose seems to have been to get Thoreau away from Protestants, and among the influences of the Catholic churches and traditions, and thus to make a convert of him.
His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone existed, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine, and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them.
He could turn his idealism to practical account. A man who had been camping with him told me that on such expeditions he carried a small piece of cake carefully wrapped up in his pocket and that after he had eaten his dinner he would take a small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed to do the rest. The most unpromising subject would often kindle the imagination of Thoreau.
It is clear that an artist in words, in jotting down thoughts and images as they first emerge, may instinctively use language which is subtly blended of verse and prose, like many rhapsodical passages in the private journals of Thoreau and Emerson.
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