Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/371

Rh men whose powers of mind and soul should preclude undue emphasis of minor faults.

He lived the present life sincerely and intensely, in the light of the future, a future, to his vision, not one of reward so much as of soul-expansion. “Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another.” In the ﬁnal analysis, his life-purpose was fealty to nature; other subjects were correlated, symbolic, or contrasting issues from this great interest. Noting with delight a little hillside stream at Hull, he wrote, in “Cape Cod,” the simple yet signiﬁcant confession,—“If I should go to Rome, perhaps it would be some spring in the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.” In his diverse, potent nature-interpretation, in his uplifting ideals, towards which he strove with patience and progress, in his literary uniqueness and pictorial magnetism, Thoreau is a solitary ﬁgure, yet a pregnant inspiration, in American history and literature.