Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/113

Rh make us conversant with the nobler part of our nature. It will chasten us and prepare us to meet accident on higher ground next time."

As mentioned in the review of John's life, the two brothers enlarged their classes and taught in the Concord Academy from 1839–1841. Though this was a very brief period of the tentative years of Henry Thoreau's life, and it represented all of his direct school-teaching, yet, in a broad sense, his entire influence, widely and subtly extended, was that of a teacher and the trend of his mind was assertive and pedagogical, though rarely pedantic. His aim throughout life was to teach the value and messages of Nature, in her full meaning. The long walks, in which he delighted to include the children of the village no less than of his school, were really matchless lessons in nature-observation. To each individual child he would give some special attention or rouse some specific enthusiasm in flower or habits of bird and insect. Not alone in personal experiment, as a means of teaching, but also in the use of the story, as the most potent educative method, Thoreau was a prophet and example to these later decades. With the insight of a modern pedagogue he realized the need of training the imagination, so largely starved during the first century of American school-life.