HENRY THOREAU
bloody death desirable, and raised in each the hope that even the short thread of life spun out to him by grudging Fate might yet gleam in the glorious tapestry of story.
And the men and maids for one moment knew
That the song was truer than what was true.
Our hero was a born story-teller, and of the Norseman type in many ways, a right Saga-man and Scald like them, telling of woods and waters and the dwarfkin that peopled them — and ever he knew what he saw for a symbol, and looked through it for a truth. “Even the facts of science,” said he, “may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced by the dews of fresh and living truth.”
When one asked Aristotle, why we like to spend much time with handsome people? “That is a blind man's ques-
92
