Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/169

 open his prison doors, — why the judge does not dismiss his case, — why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation. It is because they do not obey the hint that God gives them, nor accept the pardon that he freely offers to all.”

Page 75, note 1. The “River Fisherman” was written by Mrs. Edith Emerson Forbes.

Page 76, note 1. Thoreau wrote in his journal: “There are poets of all kinds and degrees, little known to each other. The Lake School is not the only, or the principal one. They love various things; some love beauty, and some love rum. Some go to Rome, — and some go a-fishing, and are sent to the house of correction once a month. They keep up their fires by means unknown to me. I know not their comings and goings. I know them wild, and ready to risk all when their muse invites. I meet these gods of the river and woods with sparkling faces (like Apollo's), late from the house of correction, it may be, — carrying whatever mystic and forbidden bottles or other vessels concealed; while the dull, regular priests are steering their parish rafts in a prose mood. What care I to see galleries full of representations of heathen gods, when I can see actual living ones by an infinitely superior artist?”

He loved the River: “It is my own highway, the only wild and unfenced part of the world hereabouts.” But always he looked for something behind what he saw. At another time