Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/124

 “What a recipe for preserving wood, to fill its pores with music! How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit this music. The resounding wood, — how much the ancients would have made of it! To have had a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and played on by the winds of every latitude and longitude, and that harp were (so to speak) the manifest blessing of Heaven on a work of man's.”

It seems well here to introduce some passages shedding light on the relations of four men who, between the years 1835 and 1845, met as dwellers in our village, — though only Thoreau was born there, — all scholars in different ways, who, afterwards, won some fame by their lives and books.

Two newly married young men came