Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/18

4 earth in spring, in which the flowers spring and expand. It is not words that I wish to hear or to utter, but relations that I wish to stand in, and it oftener happens, methinks, I go away unmet, unrecognized, ungreeted in my offered relation, than that you are disappointed of words.

I have seen in the form, in the expression of face, of a child three years old the tried magnanimity and grave nobility of ancient and departed worthies. I saw a little Irish boy, come from the distant shanty in the woods over the bleak railroad to school this morning, take his last step from the last snow-drift on to the schoolhouse door-step, floundering still, saw not his face nor his profile, only his mien; I imagined, saw clearly in imagination, his old worthy face behind the sober visor of his cap. Ah! this little Irish boy, I know not why, revives to my mind the worthies of antiquity. He is not drawn, he never was drawn, in a willow wagon. He progresses by his own brave steps. Has not the world waited for such a generation. Here he condescends to his a b c, without one smile, who has the lore of worlds uncounted in his brain. He speaks not of the adventures of the causeway. What was the bravery of Leonidas and his three hundred boys at the Pass of Thermopylae to this infant's! They but dared to die,