Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/159

Rh that valor and virtue for the future which is more properly itself, than in these improper actions which by being sins discover themselves to be not itself.

Sir Walter Raleigh's faults are those of a courtier and a soldier. In his counsels and aphorisms we see not unfrequently the haste and rashness of a boy. His philosophy was not wide nor deep, but continually giving way to the generosity of his nature. What he touches he adorns by his greater humanity and native nobleness, but he touches not the true and original. He seems to have been fitted by his genius for short flights of impulsive poetry, but not for the sustained loftiness of Shakespeare or Milton. He was not wise nor a seer in any sense, but rather one of nature's nobility, the most generous nature which can be found to linger in the purlieus of a court.—His was a singularly perverted genius, with a great inclination to originality and freedom, and yet who never steered his own course. Of so fair and susceptible a nature, rather than broad or deep, that he lingered to slake his thirst at the nearest and even somewhat turbid wells of truth and beauty. His homage to the less fair or noble left no space for homage to the all fair. The misfortune of his circumstances or rather of the man appears in the fact that he was the