accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear
this in mind.

His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace
to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made
this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. Himself of a
perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a disgust at
crime, and no worldly success could cover it. He detected paltering as
readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal
scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers
called him "that terrible Thoreau," as if he spoke when silent, and was
still present when he had departed. I think the severity of his ideal
interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.

The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance
inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of
antagonism defaced his earlier writings,--a trick of rhetoric not quite
outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought
its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for
their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and
commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. "It was so dry,
that you might call it wet."

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the
one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those
who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there
was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a
large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though
he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption
that the science of the day pretended completeness, and he had just found