Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/43

Rh No place other than Concord could be so fittingly identified with Thoreau's personality. The varied and prodigal forms of nature allured him to become her poet and naturalist. The independence and virility of intellectual life awakened his speculative mind to search for a new philosophy of living. The literary impulse of the town fostered innate love for letters and encouraged him to preserve thoughts on nature and humanity destined to bring fame to his loved "Rome." Born, bred, and tested amid such environment, his inherited traits, to be noted in the next chapter, reached full development and created a personality unique in American literature. As he immortalized Concord scenery and products, so, in turn, was his strange and plastic genius evolved by her intellectual activity. In an address at the dedication of the Concord Public Library in 1873, Emerson well summarized these varied bonds which identified Thoreau with his parental town. These words, among the later public utterances of Emerson, have escaped the use of Thoreau's biographers. The sentences of possible reproach and disappointment, spoken or written about Thoreau by this first teacher and friend of renown, have been widely quoted and often misconstrued. It is fitting that these later sentences of frank, careful analysis should also be recorded, as testimony to the mutual