horeau with the friendliness and neighborliness that his friend Dr.
Edward W. Emerson claims for him. In a recent letter to me, Dr. Emerson
writes: "He carried the old New England undemonstrativeness very far. He
was also, I believe, really shy, prospered only in monologue, except in
a walk in the woods with one companion, and his difficulties increased
to impossibility in a room full of people." Dr. Emerson admits that
Thoreau is himself to blame for giving his readers the impression that
he held his kind in contempt, but says that in reality he had
neighborliness, was dutiful to parents and sisters, showed courtesy to
women and children and an open, friendly side to many a simple,
uncultivated townsman.

This practical helpfulness and friendliness in Thoreau's case seems to
go along with the secret contempt he felt and expressed in his Journal
toward his fellow townsmen. At one time he was chosen among the
selectmen to perambulate the town lines--an old annual custom. One day
they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the
next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a
week. Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. "A fatal coarseness is the
result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been
associating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I
feel inexpressibly begrimed." How fragile his self-respect was! Yet he
had friends among the surrounding farmers, whose society and
conversation he greatly valued.

That Thoreau gave the impression of being what country folk call a
crusty person--curt and forbidding in manner--seems pretty well
established. His friend Alcott says he was deficient in the human
sentiments. Emerson, who, on the whole, loved and admired him, says:
"Thoreau sometimes appears only as a _gendarme_, good to knock down a
cockney with, but without that power to cheer and establish which
makes the value of a friend." Again he says: "If I knew only Thoreau,
I should think cooeperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk
for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the
higher gifts,--the insight of the real, or from the real, and the
moral rectitude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources
of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after
year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some
weary captious