Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/15

4 could jeopard anything on him. A limpid man, a realist with caustic eyes that looked through all words and shows and bearing with terrible perception!" "Thoreau was a Stoic," says G. W. Curtis, "but he was in no sense a cynic. His neighbors in the village thought him odd and whimsical, but his practical skill as a surveyor and in woodcraft was known to them. No man was his enemy, and some of the best were his fastest friends. But his life was essentially solitary and reserved. Careless of appearances in later days, when his hair and beard were long, if you had seen him in the woods, you might have fancied Orson passing by; but had you stopped to talk with him, you would have felt that you had seen the shepherd of Admetus' flock, or chatted with a wiser Jaques." The same writer has graphically described the characteristic rigour of Thoreau's personal manner—his "erect posture, which made it seem impossible that he should ever lounge or slouch, and which made Hawthorne speak of him as 'cast-iron,'" and his "staccato style of speech, every word coming separately and distinctly, as if preserving the same cool isolation in the sentence that the speaker did in society."

The most intimate of Thoreau's friends were Emerson, Ellery Channing, Alcott, Harrison Blake, Daniel Ricketson, and F. B. Sanborn, all of whom have expressed the strongest admiration for the nobility and purity of his genius. It has been his misfortune—or rather the misfortune of a later generation of readers—that his eccentricities have been magnified out of all due proportion by