Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/119

 was the wise man's answer; and Thoreau, looking at beautiful Mother Nature, might have given the same answer to a townsman anxious lest he stay in the fields too long for the good of pencil-making. How Thoreau felt when alone with Nature may be gathered from his words about her, “At once our Destiny and Abode, our Maker and our Life.” The humour, the raciness, and the flavour of the moor and the greenwood that is in the Robin Hood ballads he loved, was in his speech. In his books, particularly “Walden,” the contentious tone may linger unpleasantly in the reader's ears and memory, but remember, Thoreau, in his day, was administering wholesome, if bitter, medicine. Yet when he at last lays by his wholesome but fatiguing buffeting North-wind method, there comes winning sunshine;