Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/111

Rh in the evolution of his emotional and philosophical traits. They were the happiest years of active, buoyant life, they brought him his deepest sentiments and his keenest griefs, and they also gave him direct contact with his most influential friends. His emotional nature seems to have suffered "arrested development" after the experiences of these years. Circumstances, in rapid succession, interfered with the expansion of his happy emotions; other incidents of environment caused a resort to nature and philosophy to aid in the repression and endurance of disappointment; his newmade friends fostered the extreme ideals of transcendental thought on the abstract problems rather than the amenities of life.

Before turning to those later influences, which prepared for his climactic experience at Walden, attention is called to one poem which recorded the memory of his love and suggested the possibilities of gentleness and expansive emotions which a happy issue might have brought into his later life. In the second section of "A Week" the "elastic and crystalline air" brings a reminiscence, followed by the poem generally entitled in collections, "To the Maiden in the East." It has been claimed that the poem was addressed to his friend, Mary Russell, afterwards Mrs. Marston Watson, of Plymouth.