Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/33

 and a grant was made to his widow and children by the Province, 'because he died in the service of his country.'"

Thoreau was for years striving to express in words what music signified to him. He attempted it in that paradoxical fragment called The Service, written out for The Dial in 1840, but not published in full till sixty years later. He attempted it again in the various drafts of The Week, and printed one or two such pages. But there remains in the manuscript before me a passage of which some lines were printed, but which deserves to be given as it stands. It was suggested by the rude drumming of the tyro calling men together for a country muster; but it rose far above that or any real music, into the ideal region where Thoreau was most at home. He said:

"Man should have an accompaniment of music through Nature. It relieves the scenery, which is seen through it as a subtler element, like a very clear morning air in autumn. A man s life should be a steady march to an inaudible but sweet and all-pervading music; and when he seems to halt, he will still be [xxv]