Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/130

116 earnest life that interrupts. All flourishes are omitted. If I saw wood from morning to night, though I grieve that I could not observe the train of my thoughts during that time, yet in the evening, the few scrawled lines which describe my day's occupation will make the creaking of the saw more musical than my freest fancies could have been.

I discover in Raleigh's verses the vices of the courtier. They are not equally sustained, as if his noble genius were warped by the frivolous society of the court. He was capable of rising to a remarkable elevation. His poetry has for the most part a heroic tone and vigor, as of a knight errant. But again there seems to have been somewhat unkindly in his education, as if he had by no means grown up to be the man he promised. He was apparently too genial and loyal a soul, or rather he was incapable of resisting temptation from that quarter. If to his genius and culture he could have added the temperament of Fox or Cromwell, the world would have had cause longer to remember him. One would have said it was by some lucky fate that he and Shakespeare flourished at the same time in England, and yet what do we know of their acquaintanceship?

Jan. 5, 1852. To-day the trees are white with snow,—I mean their stems and branches,—