with pencil in hand, hundreds of Jesuit Relations and other books dealing with our problematical savages; yet now, when the work was almost ready to be commenced in methodical earnest,—
Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.
How well Thoreau bore this frustration of his plans and hopes, all those who saw him during his long and fatal illness know and bear witness. Ellery Channing, who had been more with him than any other comrade in his many rambles, sums up the matter pathetically at the close of his Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist." when he says:
"His habit of engrossing his thoughts in a journal, which had lasted for a quarter-century; his out-of-door life, of which he used to say, if he omitted that, all his living ceased,—all this became so incontrovertibly a thing of the past that he said to me once, standing at the window, 'I cannot see on the outside at all; we thought ourselves great philosophers in those wet days, when we used to go out and sit down by the wall-sides.’
[xxxvii]
