HENRY D. THOEEAU 13 



ageness took a mild form. He could not even eat 

 meat; it was unclean and offended his imagination, 

 and when he went to Maine he felt for weeks that 

 his nature had been made the coarser because he 

 had witnessed the killing of a moose. His boasted 

 savageness, the gray wolf in him, only gave a more 

 decided grit or grain to his mental and moral nature, 

 — made him shut his teeth the more firmly, some- 

 times even with an audible snap and growl, upon 

 the poor lambs and ewes and superannuated wethers 

 of the social, religious, political folds. 



In his moral and intellectual growth and expe- 

 rience, Thoreau seems to have reacted strongly from 

 a marked tendency to invalidism in his own body. 

 He would be well in spirit at all hazards. What 

 was this never-ending search of his for the wild 

 but a search for health, for something tonic and 

 antiseptic in nature? Health, health, give me 

 health, is his cry. He went forth into nature as 

 the boys go to the fields and woods in spring after 

 wintergreens, black birch, crinkle-root, and sweet- 

 flag; he had an unappeasable hunger for the pun- 

 gent, the aromatic, the bitter-sweet, for the very 

 rind and salt of the globe. He fairly gnaws the 

 ground and the trees in his walk, so craving is his 

 appetite for the wild. He went to Walden to 

 study, but it was as a deer goes to a deer-lick; the 

 brine he was after did abound there. Any trait of 

 wildness and freedom suddenly breaking out in any 

 of the domestic animals, as when your cow leaped 

 your fence like a deer and ate up your corn, or 



