Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/145

 he, with truth and Nature to help him, cut a way through to freedom. “He looked up to a mountain tract &ensp;And saw that every morning, far withdrawn &ensp;Beyond the darkness and the cataract, &ensp;God made himself an awful rose of Dawn, &ensp;Unheeded; yes, for many a month and year &ensp;Unheeded ever.” But not by him. He learned this, he says, by his experiment of a life with Nature simply followed for his guide; that “if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life that he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of