F. B. Sanborn

“ Is fear the ruling principle of our religion? Is it not rather the mother of superstition? Yes, that principle which prompts us to pay an involuntary homage to the infinite, the incomprehensible, the sublime, forms the very basis of our religion. It is a principle implanted in us by our Maker, a part of our very selves; we cannot eradicate it, we cannot resist it; fear may be overcome, death may be despised; but the infinite, the sublime seize upon the soul and disarm it. ”

“ Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
This sounded hollow then, but when that embodiment of American justice and mercy, John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia prison, a dozen years later, the significance of Thoreau's words began to be seen; and when a few years after our countrymen were dying by hundreds of thousands to complete what Brown, with his single life, had begun, the whole truth, as Thoreau had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation. ”

“ The eye wanders over the broad and seemingly compact surface of the slumbering forest on the opposite side of the stream, and catches an occasional glimpse of a little farm-house, 'resting in a green hollow, and lapped in the bosom of plenty;' while a gentle swell of the river, a rustic, and fortunately rather old-looking bridge on the right, with the cloudlike Wachusett in the distance, give a finish and beauty to the landscape, that is rarely to be met with even in our own fair land. ”

“ Angered at the ingratitude of his minister, the stammering farmer turned the ten yoke of cattle round in the doctor's garden, and drove on to the village, leaving the parson to shovel himself out and get to meeting the best way he could. Meanwhile, the teamsters sat in the warm bar-room at the tavern, and cheered themselves with punch, flip, grog, and toddy, instead of going to hear Dr. Ripley hold forth; and when he had returned to his parsonage they paraded their oxen and sleds back again, past his gate, with much more shouting than at first. ”

“ This hour did come, and the removal was made for a few months or years, during which the two friends met at odd intervals, and in queer companionship. But the "sweet and solid mortar of friendship" was never broken, though the wall of life came to look like a ruin. When, in Thoreau's last illness, Channing, in deep grief, said "that a change had come over the dream of life, and that solitude began to peer out curiously from the dells and wood-roads," Thoreau whispered, "with his foot on the step of the other world," says Channing, "It is better some things should end." ”

“ The feelings which come over one on first beholding this freak of nature are indescribable. The giddy height, the iron-bound rock, the boundless horizon open around, and the beautiful river at your feet, with its green and sloping banks, fringed with trees and shrubs of every description, are calculated to excite in the beholder emotions of no common occurrence,—to inspire him with noble and sublime emotions. ”

“ It was the sunrise of New England Transcendentalism in which he first looked upon the spiritual world; when Carlyle in England, Alcott, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller in Massachusetts, were preparing their contemporaries in America for that modern Renaissance which has been so fruitful, for the last forty years, in high thought, vital religion, pure literature, and great deeds. ”

“ The atmosphere of earnest purpose, which pervaded the great movement for the emancipation of the slaves, gave to the Thoreau family an elevation of character which was ever afterward perceptible, and imparted an air of dignity to the trivial details of life. ”

“ Those ages, in fact, were well-nigh lost upon us, until Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellowship, brought us into communication with the Greek, the Italian, and the noble Elizabethan revivals of genius and art. We had been living under the Puritan reaction, modified and politically fashioned by the more humane philosophy of the eighteenth century, while the freedom-breathing, but half-barbarizing influences of pioneer life in a new continent, had also turned aside the full force of English and Scotch Calvinism. ”

“ They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house; to live in the country rather than in the town; and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. They are not good citizens, not good members of society ”

“ I had known this man of genius for the last seven years of his too short life; had lived in his family, and in the house of his neighbor across the way, Ellery Channing, his most intimate friend outside of that family; and had assisted Channing in the preparation and publication of his "Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist,"—the first full biography which appeared. Not very long after Thoreau's death Channing had written me these sentences, with that insight of the future which he often displayed:
"That justice can be done to our deceased brother by me, of course I do not think. ”

“ Alcott's testimony to Thoreau's worth and friendliness has been constant.
"If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to the gods for the greatest of all human privileges," he said one day, after returning from an evening spent at Walden with Thoreau, "it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend. To most, the presence of such is painfully irksome; they are lovers of present reputation, and not of that exaltation of soul which friends and discourse were given to awaken and cherish in us. Intercourse of this kind I have found possible with my friends Emerson and Thoreau ”

“ Transcendentalists, or, as they prefer to be called, Realists, presume to follow Reason in her purest dictates, her sublime and unfrequented regions. They presume, by her power, not only to discover what is truth, but to judge of revealed truth. But is not their whole process marred by leaving out common sense, by which mankind are generally governed? That superiority which places a man above the power of doing good to his fellow-men seems to me not very desirable. ”

“ Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. For eighteen hundred years the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of government? ”

“ 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." ”

“ The character of poet is so high and so rare, in any modern civilization, and specially in our American career of nationality, that it behooves us to mark and claim all our true poets, before they are classified under some other name,—as philosophers, naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus Emerson is primarily and chiefly a poet, and only a philosopher in his second intention; and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist by habit, and a moralist by constitution, was inwardly a poet by force of that shaping and controlling imagination, which was his strongest faculty. ”

“ Thought lies too detached, truth is seen too much in detail; we can number and mark the substances imbedded in the rock. Thus his verses are startling as much as stern; the thought does not excuse its conscious existence by letting us see its relation with life; there is a want of fluent music. ”

“ Life to them was something more than a parade of pretensions, a conflict of ambitions, or an incessant scramble for the common objects of desire. They were fond of climbing to the hill-top, and could look with a broader and kindlier vision than most of us on the commotions of the plain and the mists of the valley. ”

“ Edmund Hosmer was also, in George Curtis's description of a conversation at Mr. Emerson's house in 1845, "the sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well of her country." And it may be that he was Ellery Channing's
"Spicy farming sage,
Twisted with heat and cold and cramped with age,
Who grunts at all the sunlight through the year,
And springs from bed each morning with a cheer. ”

“ Emerson, "in a funeral sermon on some parishioner, whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, 'He was good at fires.' Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet, even in his old age, if the firebell was rung, he was instantly on horseback, with his buckets and bag." He had even some willingness, perhaps not equal to the zeal of the Hindoo saint, to extinguish the Orthodox fires of hell, which had long blazed in New England,—so that men might worship God with less fear. But he had small sympathy with the Transcendentalists when they began to appear in Concord. ”

“ I think one in middle life feels averse to change, and especially to local change. The Lares and Penates love to establish themselves, and desire no moving. But the fatal hour may come, when, bidding one long, one last adieu to those weather-beaten Penates, we sally forth with Don Quixote, once more to strike our lances into some new truth, or life, or man. ”

“ They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire whether Transcendentalism does not mean sloth; they had as lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcendentalist; for then is he paralyzed, and can do nothing for humanity."
It was this phase of Transcendentalism that gave most anxiety to Thoreau's good old pastor, Dr. Ripley, who early foresaw what immediate fruit might be expected from this fair tree of mysticism,—this "burning bush" which had started up, all at once, in the very garden of his parsonage. ”

“ If you have a Soul, great as that Hero David of old, you will ask of the Lord, and not go till he bid you: David would not. If you are sincerely desirous to know and do your duty in that and every other respect, and seek of God in Faith, you shall know that, and everything else needful, one thing after another, as fast as you are prepared for it. ”

“ The resemblance between some of John Woolman's utterances and those of Henry Thoreau has been noticed by Whittier, who says of the New Jersey Quaker, "From his little farm on the Rancocas he looked out with a mingled feeling of wonder and sorrow upon the hurry and unrest of the world; he regarded the merely rich man with unfeigned pity. With nothing of his scorn, he had all of Thoreau's commiseration for people who went about, bowed down with the weight of broad acres and great houses on their backs." ”

“ Except the Indians themselves, whose wood-craft he never tires of celebrating, few Americans were ever more at home in the open air than Thoreau; not even his friend John Brown, who, like himself, suggested the Indian by the delicacy of his perceptions and his familiarity with all that goes forward, or stands still, in wood and field. Thoreau could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes.
"He was a good swimmer," says Emerson, "a good runner, skater, boatman, and would outwalk most countrymen in a day's journey. ”

“ At a conversation in Concord in 1846, one April evening, Thoreau came in from his Walden hermitage, and protested with some vehemence against Mr. Alcott's declaration that Jesus "stood in a more tender and intimate nearness to the heart of mankind than any character in life or literature." Thoreau thought he "asserted this claim for the fair Hebrew in exaggeration"; yet he could say in the "Week," "It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ." ”

“ Truth before all things; in all your thoughts, your faintest breath, the austerest purity, the utmost fulfilling of the interior law; faith in friends, and an iron and flinty pursuit of right, which nothing can tease or purchase out of us. ”

“ A delegate from Worcester, who sat near Mr. Bliss, noticed that the Tory was discomposed, biting his lip, frowning, and pounding with the heel of his silver-buckled shoe. "Who is the speaker?" he asked of Bliss. "Hosmer, a Concord mechanic," was the scornful reply. "Then how does he come by his English?" "Oh, he has an old mother at home, who sits in her chimney-corner and reads and repeats poetry all day long;" adding in a moment, "He is the most dangerous rebel in Concord, for he has all the young men at his back, and [Pg 102] where he leads the way they will surely follow." ”

“ Do I exercise the faith in the divine care and protection which I ought to do? Should I not be more in my study, and less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious and charitable uses? ”

“ Ricketson that Sophia Thoreau, two weeks after her brother's death, wrote the following account of his last illness:—
"Concord, May 20, 1862.
"Dear Friend,—Profound joy mingles with my grief. I feel as if something very beautiful had happened,—not death. Although Henry is with us no longer, yet the memory of his sweet and virtuous soul must ever cheer and comfort me. My heart is filled with praise to God for the gift of such a brother, and may I never distrust the love and wisdom of Him who made him, and who has now called him to labor in more glorious fields than earth affords! ”