Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/216

190 In The Harvard Magazine for May, 1862, Mr. S. S. Higginson recalled Thoreau's "elastic spirits" and sympathetic comradeship on long walks, resembling "a glorious boy" even in later life. It has been told that he would sometimes skate thirty miles in a day; such buoyant delight was echoed in the stanzas in "A Winter Walk";—

When Winter fringes every bough

With his fantastic wreath,

And puts the seal of silence now

Upon the leaves beneath;

I gambol with my neighbor ice,

And sympathizing quake;

As each new crack darts in a trice,

Across the gladsome lake."

It was this vivacity which gave such singular presence to Thoreau, for he lacked striking physique. In climbing mountains he seemed to on-lookers to float over fences in mid-air and to scale the very clouds with his long strides. His great muscular strength and mechanical skill brought him, from a stranger whom he met on a train, an offer, of a position in a factory, "stating conditions and wages, observing that I succeeded in shutting the window of a railroad car, when the other passengers had failed."

Thoreau, with natal traits of such diverse kinds, was an apt pupil for the impulse of philosophic thought. From the first, however, his mind was