HENRY THOREAU
patient for his fruiting time, surely to come. And yet he did not quite see that Thoreau was steering a course true to his compass with happy result to his voyage, a course that would for him, Emerson, have been quite unfit. Thus, in 1848, he writes: “Henry Thoreau is like the wood-god who solicits the wandering poet, and draws him into ‘antres vast and desarts idle,’ and leaves him naked, plaiting vines and with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the end is want and madness.” The result was not so, and it must be remembered that Emerson recorded one mood or aspect at a time.
On a luckier day he writes: “Henry is a good substantial childe, not encumbered with himself. He has no troublesome memory, no wake, but lives extempore, and brings to-day a new proposition
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