Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/198

172 and muscular fibre seemed untiring, with what Emerson called "an oaken strength," should have succumbed to a lingering consumption, before half his days of rightful life were spent. As intimated, the disease had been a family blight, fastened upon both the Thoreaus and the Dunbars. In one sense, Lowell's peculiar sentence on Thoreau,—"his whole life was a search for the doctor,"—is not false. His doctor was health-giving Nature, which should bestow the tonic of purity, simplicity, and ideality to the congested civilization of the age, while she should bring, also, individual strength and elixir to his own body and soul. From his college days to the last years are occasional journal-notes of attacks of illness, passed by with light, apologetic mention, as was his wont on personal matters, yet indicating a proneness to bronchitis. As if in prescience of the future trials he wrote, after such an illness in 1841,—"Sickness should not be allowed to extend farther than the body. We need only to retreat farther within us to preserve uninterruptedly the continuity of serene hours to the end of our lives." In a letter to Mr. Blake in 1855, he refers to an illness of two or three months, followed by languor and inability to read or work. With characteristic optimism, he adds,—"However, there is one consolation in being sick and