was a Fine-ear and a Sharp-eye in the woods and fields; and he added
to his knowledge of nature the wisdom of the most ancient times and of
the best literature. His manner and matter both reproved trifling, but
in the most impersonal manner. It was like the reproof of Pan's
statue. There seemed never to be any loosening of the intellectual
tension, and a call from Thoreau in the highest sense "meant
business."

On the morning of which we are speaking the talk fell upon the
Indians, with whom he had a profound sympathy, and of whose life and
ways and nature he apparently had an instinctive knowledge. In the
slightly contemptuous inference against civilization which his remarks
left, rather than in any positively scornful tone, there was something
which rather humorously suggested the man who spoke lightly of the
equator, but with the difference that there would have been if the
light speaking had left a horrible suspicion of that excellent circle.
For Thoreau so ingeniously traced our obligations to the aborigines
that the claims of civilization for what is really essential palpably
dwindled. He dropped all manner of curious and delightful information
as he went on, and it was sad to see in the hollow cheek and the
large, unnaturally lustrous eye the signs of the disease that very
soon removed him from among us. Those who remember him, and were
familiar with his truly heroic and virtuous life, or those who
perceive in his works that spirit of sweetness and content which made
him at the last say that he was as happy to be sick as to be well,
will apply to him the words of his own poem in the first number of the
_Dial_:

"Say not that Caesar was victorious,
With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame;