Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/130

 all through his life, and was just as happy in the presence of death. This is the more remarkable, as he was still in the prime of life, with a vivid sense of its enjoyments. But he was nearer to the heart of Nature than most men. Sophia said to-day that he once told her when looking at a pressed flower that he had walked 10,000 miles to verify the day on which that flower bloomed. It grew four miles from his home, and he walked there every day in the season of it for many years He seemed to walk straight into Heaven. It is animating and inspiring to see a great or a good man take that last step with his thoughts about him, and intent upon the two worlds whose connection he sees with the clairvoyance that death gives. I know it well, and I could fully sympathize in her sense of her brother's continued presence. Death is not the word to use for such a transit,—but more life,—for which we as yet have no word."

In a letter to Thoreau's good friend at New Bedford, Daniel Ricketson (printed in Anna and Walton Ricketson's Memoir of their father, p. 142), Sophia, under date of May 20, 1862, said: "During Henry's long illness I never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us; his perfect contentment was truly wonderful. None of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. One friend,