of wood-thrushes, squirrels, sunshine, mists and
shadows, fresh vernal odors, pine-tree ocean melodies, that my ear
rang with music, and I seemed to have been wandering through copse
and dingle! Mr. Thoreau has risen above all his arrogance of
manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses
should be; and now his great blue eyes fairly outshine and put
into shade a nose which I thought must make him uncomely forever."

In his own journal Hawthorne said, "Mr. Thoreau dined with us. He
is a singular character,--a young man with much of wild, original
nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated,
it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin,
long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic,
though courteous, manners, corresponding very well with such an
exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion,
and becomes him much better than beauty."

Alcott helped build the hut at Walden, and he and Emerson spent
many an evening there in conversation that must have delighted the
gods--in so far as they understood it.

Of Alcott and their winter evenings, Thoreau has said, "One of the
last of the philosophers. Connecticut gave him to the world,--he
peddled first his wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains;
these he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing
for fruit his brain only, like the nut in the kernel. His words
and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other
men are 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,