Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/248

220 regret that he is regarded as "cold" and too reserved. To him such criticism seemed merely a divergence of friendship, a lack of true, warm entente. No reader can fail to note the tone of gentle sadness which Thoreau displayed when commenting on such misinterpretation of his steadfast loyalty, which he could not stoop to repeat in mere words. With a tender patience, he wrote of his death,—"And then I think of those amongst men who will know that I love them, though I tell them not."

Perhaps such persistence in reserve and aspirations indicated, to a surface reader, a super-sensitive, impractical, even obstinate, temperament. Granting the existence of some natal qualities of this sort, these lofty ideals were also the expression of the poet and the moral reformer. They resulted from his acceptance of many transcendental beliefs, from his appeal to the intuitive, spiritual nature. Among significant notes that illumine this theme is the journal paragraph, in "Winter," for December 12, 1851;—"In regard to my friends, I feel that I know and have communion with a finer and subtler part of themselves which does not put me off when they put me off, which is not cold to me when they are cold, not till I am cold. I hold by a deeper and stronger tie than absence can sunder." Again, in