Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/38

 before that age, and apparently between the beginning of 1839, when he was twenty-one, and 1845, when he built his Walden hermitage. He had just passed his twenty-second birthday (July 12) when preparing for his river voyage, and most of the passages quoted in this volume were written before he was twenty-seven. His youth was the season of paradox and social revolt,—the latter never proceeding so far as many of his critics have been ill-informed enough to declare. Even in college, before he was twenty, President Quincy, that sturdy mixture of conformity and non-conformity, had to defend him a little against the misconstruction of his professors, a class apt to be intolerant of originality, when they are keen enough to discover it. Writing to Emerson in June 1837, Quincy said:

"Your view concerning Thoreau is entirely in consent with that which I entertain. I was willing and desirous that whatever falling off there had been in his scholarship should be attributable to his sickness. He had, however, imbibed some notions concerning emulation and college rank which had a [xxx]