much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and
actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his
literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not
believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last I
met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to
my glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of
a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his
fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with
tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which
made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose
failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that
shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after
he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across
the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other; but
apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort, for
he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit
about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have
not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and
that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but
I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The
truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and
all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical
discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of
himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the
warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of
John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we
were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to
cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.

It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself