wolflike, but it is still communicative.

Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on"
again to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more
nobly. It was the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown
of Harper's Ferry. The French and Scotch blood in the furtive
hermit suddenly grew hot. Instead of renouncing in disgust the
"uncivil chaos called Civil Government," Thoreau challenged it to
a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the gauntlet in
"Slavery in Massachusetts," which Garrison had published in the
"Liberator" in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of the
old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a complete
citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the
dead hero. "It seems as if no man had ever died in America
before; for in order to die you must first have lived . . . . I
hear a good many pretend that they are going to die . . . .
Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got life enough
in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred
eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen
or so have died since the world began." Such passages as this
reveal a very different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed
to have spent his days in the company of swamp-blackbirds and
woodchucks. He had, in fact, one of the highest qualifications
for human society, an absolute honesty of mind. "We select
granite," he says, "for the underpinning of our houses and barns;
we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an
underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our
sills are rotten . . . . In proportion as our inward life fails,
we go more constantly and desperately to the postoffice. You may
depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the