Page Five 



" I never asked thy leave to let me love thee, — I have a 

 right. I love thee not as something private and personal, 

 which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of 

 love, which I have found. . . . The Friend asks no return 

 but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not dis- 

 grace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. 

 They are kind to each other's dreams." 



Nor does he deserve the charge — sometimes made against 

 him — of provincialism. If is true that he never felt the urge 

 to travel, and that his journeyings were not of great dis- 

 tance or duration. It is true that he said, when urged to 

 visit Paris : 



''Paris could but be a stepping-stone to Concord," and, 

 on returning from a short trip to Canada : 



" ^Vhat I got by going to Canada was a cold." 



But he had come to realize, through his gift of extensive 

 and penetrating observation, that in and about Concord there 

 was more of nature to be seen and studied than he could hope 

 to include in several lifetimes of investigation. And he 

 was averse to dissipating his energies. 



Thoreau was a layman who went through the world with 

 wide-open eyes, eagerly examining into the ways of nature; 

 he was a naturalist who never lost, in his passion for exact 

 knowledge, the glamour of beauty, the thrill of mystery. 



Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal 

 that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. 



But that joy can be real onhj if people look upon their life as a service, 

 Qfnd have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal hap- 

 piness. 



Tolstoi. 



