liberator, like Lincoln, he seems also destined like Lincoln to
become increasingly a world's figure, a friend and guide to
aspiring spirits everywhere. Differences of race and creed are
negligible in the presence of such superb confidence in God and
the soul.

Citizens of Concord in May, 1862, hearing that Henry Thoreau, the
eccentric bachelor, had just died of consumption in his mother's
house on Main Street, in his forty-fifth year, would have smiled
cannily at the notion that after fifty years their townsman's
literary works would be published in a sumptuous twenty-volume
edition, and that critics in his own country and in Europe would
rank him with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet that is precisely what has
happened. Our literature has no more curious story than the
evolution of this local crank into his rightful place of
mastership. In his lifetime he printed only two books, "A Week on
the Concord and Merrimac Rivers"--which was even more completely
neglected by the public than Emerson's "Nature"--and "Walden,"
now one of the classics, but only beginning to be talked about
when its shy, proud author penned his last line and died with the
words "moose" and "Indian" on his lips.

Thoreau, like all thinkers who reach below the surface of human
life, means many different things to men of various temperaments.
Collectors of human novelties, like Stevenson, rejoice in his
uniqueness of flavor; critics, like Lowell, place him, not
without impatient rigor. To some readers he is primarily a
naturalist, an observer, of the White of Selborne school; to
others an elemental man, a lover of the wild, a hermit of the
woods. He has been called the poet-naturalist, to indicate that