acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve.  A true friend of man, almost the only friend of human progress.  He is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance to know,—­the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow.  Ah, such discourse as we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of,—­we three; it expanded and racked my little home;”—­to say nothing of the universe, which doubtless felt the strain.

Referring to the same evening, Alcott said,—­probably after a chastening discussion,—­“If I were to proffer my earnest prayer to the gods for the greatest of all human privileges, it should be for the gift of a severely candid friend.  Intercourse of this kind I have found possible with my friends Emerson and Thoreau; and the evenings passed in their society during these winter months have realized my conception of what friendship, when great and genuine, owes to and takes from its objects.”

Nearly twenty years after Thoreau’s death, Alcott, while walking towards the close of day, said, “I always think of Thoreau when I look at a sunset.”

Emerson was fourteen years older than Thoreau, but between the two men there existed through life profound sympathy and affection.  Emerson watched him develop as a young man, and delivered the address at his funeral; for two years they lived in the same house, and concerning him Emerson wrote in 1863, a year after his death, “In reading Henry Thoreau’s journal, I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution.  That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field laborer accosts a piece of work which I should shun as a waste of strength, Henry shows in his literary task.  He has muscle, and ventures in and performs feats which I am forced to decline.  In reading him I find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generalization.  ’Tis as if I went into a gymnasium and saw youths leap and climb and swing with a force unapproachable, tho these feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.”  One is reminded of Mrs. Hawthorne’s vivid characterization of the two men as she saw them on the ice of the Musketaquid twenty years before.

In our reverence for a place where a great man for a time has had his home, we must not forget that, while death may mark a given spot, life is quite another matter.  A man may be born or may die in a country, a city, a village, a house, a room, or,—­narrower still,—­a bed; for birth and death are physical events, but life is something quite different.  Birth is the welding of the soul to a given body; death is the dissolution of that connection; life is the relation of the imprisoned soul to its environment, and the content of that environment depends largely upon the individual; it may be as narrow as the village in which he lives, or it may stretch beyond the uttermost stars.  A man may live on a farm, or he may visit the cities of the earth,—­it does not matter much; his life is the sum total of his experiences, his sympathies, his loves, of his hopes and ambitions, his dreams and aspirations, his beliefs and convictions.