Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/75

Rh suffrance, and not by right, has been fully corrected during recent years. One who well knew the home-circle said,—"No one could more heartily enjoy his family life than Henry." If there has seemed unusual delay in introducing the subject of this biography, it has been with the purpose of carefully revealing the environment, physical and mental, and the family traits of the Thoreaus, in order that, with the background completed, his entrance might seem in general harmony with his surroundings, as indeed it was. If thus regarded, he will not stand forth as the exotic and eccentric that he has so often been called. He was the product of "Concord woods and Concord culture" and he revealed, as well, the ancestral traits of two distinct and remarkable families. French love for nature, wit, and energy, Scotch doggedness and courageous emphasis of freedom, Puritan rigidity of principle and conscience, latent tenderness with external reserve, united with Quaker love of simplicity and dislike of general society,—such family qualities were resident in the boy, born in 1817, at the isolated farmhouse beside the poplars, the peat-bogs, and the ambling brook, on the old Virginia road. The place of Thoreau's birth has been rendered doubly interesting by the recent resurrection of a tradition which is grounded on fact, that here, a