Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/258

228 exercised a wise, gracious caution and patience, qualities which, added to the paramount influence of his presence. Full of the desire for reform of individual life and general society, until the critical decade of the wide-spread anti-slavery movement, he never lent his name nor influence to any rabid or extreme methods. He could not understand that intense devotion to ideas of abstract government which brought Thoreau to jail for non-payment of taxes. He regretted, also, the tenacious refusal of his friend to accept opportunities for travel and progression in worldly ways. As he once hinted, it was a grief to him that a man, fitted to be a leader of men in thought and action, should be content to become merely "a leader of huckle-berry parties of young people." In the Concord circle of his day, and in the wider world of public opinion since, Emerson, with his balanced judgment, his broad and cautious respect for custom and affairs of state, his serene yet no less magnetic aspirations for a gradual, sure adjustment of conditions that would effect a more simple, sincere civilization, has gained greater honor than his more radical pupil-friend, Thoreau. The latter, as Emerson recognized in his comments on the journal already quoted, carried to extreme issues many of the seething, perplexing ideals of the day,