10 INDOOE STUDIES 



his surroundings. He planted himself far Beyond 

 the coast-line that bounds most lives, and seems 

 insular and solitary; but he believed he had the 

 granite floor of principle beneath him, and -without 

 the customary intervening clay or quicksands. 



Of a profile we say the outlines are strong, or 

 they are weak and broken. The outlines of Tho- 

 reau's moral nature are strong and noble, but the 

 direct face-to-face expression of his character is not 

 always pleasing, not always human. He appears 

 best in profile, when looking away from you and 

 not toward you, — when looking at nature and not 

 at man. He combined a remarkable strength of 

 will with a nature singularly sensitive and delicate, 

 — the most fair and fragile of wood-flowers on an 

 iron stem. With more freedom and flexibility of 

 character, greater capacity for self-surrender and 

 self-abandonment, he would have been a great poet. 

 But his principal aim in life was moral and intellec- 

 tual, rather than artistic. He was an ascetic before 

 he was a poet, and he cuts the deepest in the direc- 

 tion of character and conduct. He had no caution 

 or prudence in the ordinary sense, no worldly tem- 

 porizing qualities of any kind ; was impatient of the 

 dross and alloy of life, — would have it pure flame, 

 pure purpose and aspiration; and, so far as he could 

 make it, his life was so. He was, by nature, of the 

 Opposition; he had a constitutional No in him that 

 could not be tortured into Yes. He was of the stuff 

 that saints and martyrs and devotees, or, if you please, 

 fanatics are made of, and no doubt, in an earlier age, 



