from the scaffold, at last appeared in John Brown:

“I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.' It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that, to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”

Before these simple words of Brown, down went Webster and all his industry in behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution." When Thoreau heard them, and saw the matchless behavior of his noble old friend, he recognized the hour and the

man.

66

"For once," he cried in the church-vestry at Concord, we are lifted into the region of truth and manhood. No man, in America, has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature; knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. The only government that I recognize, and it

matters not how few are at the head of it, or how is that power which establishes

small its army, justice in the land."

Words like these have proved immortal when spoken in the cell of Socrates, and they lose none of their vitality, coming from the Concord philosopher.

The weakness of Webster was in his moral principles; he could not resist temptation; could not keep out of debt; could not avoid those obligations which the admiration or the selfishness of his friends forced upon him, and which left him, in his old age, neither independence nor gratitude. Thoreau's strength was in his moral nature, and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage himself, his time, or his opinions, even to the State or the Church. The haughtiness of his independence kept him from a thousand temptations that beset men of less courage and self-denial.

CHAPTER XIII.

LIFE, DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY.

THE life of Thoreau naturally divides itself into three parts: his Apprenticeship, from birth to the summer of 1837, when he left Harvard College; his Journey-work (Wanderjahre) from 1837 to 1849, when he appeared as an author, with his first book; and his Mastership, not of a college, a merchantman, or a mechanic art, but of the trade and mystery of writing. He had aspired to live and study and practice, so that he could write-to use his own words "sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not report an old, but make a new impression." To frame such sentences as these, he said, "as durable as a Roman aqueduct," was the art of writing coveted by him ; "sentences which are expressive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders

66

on the page, up and down or across, - not mere repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground or cattle to build." It was this thirst for final and concentrated expression, and not love of fame, or literary aspirations," as poor Greeley put it, which urged him on to write. For printing he cared little, and few authors since Shakespeare have been less anxious to publish what they wrote. Of the seven volumes of his works yet printed, and as many more which may be published some day, only two, "The Week" and "Walden," appeared in his lifetime, though the material for two more had been scattered about in forgotten magazines and newspapers, for his friends to collect after his death. Of his first works (and some of his best) it could be said, as Thomas Wharton said, in 1781, of his friend Gray's verses, "I yet reflect with pain upon the cool reception which those noble odes, The Progress of Poetry' and The Bard' met with at their first publication; it appeared there were not twenty people in England who liked them." This disturbed Thoreau's friends, but not himself; he rather rejoiced

in the slow sale of his first book; and when the balance of the edition,- more than seven hundred copies out of one thousand, - came back upon his hands unsold in 1855, or thereabout, he told me with glee that he had made an addition of seven hundred volumes to his library, and all of his own composition. "O solitude, obscurity, meanness!" he exclaims in 1856 to his friend Blake, "I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbors' eyes." Of course, pride had something to do with this; "it was a wild stock of pride," as Burke said of Lord Keppel," on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues."

him to write,

Both pride and piety led

"Fame cannot tempt the bard

Who's famous with his God,

Nor laurel him reward

Who has his Maker's nod."

Though often ranked as an unbeliever, and too scornful in some of his expressions concerning the religion of other men, Thoreau was in truth deeply religious. Sincerity and devotion were his most marked traits; and both are seen in his verses from