Home ➨ Ripples From Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau - Through the Eyes of His Peers…
Mr. Thoreau 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, with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with his honest and agreeable exterior, which becomes him much better than beauty. He is a keen and delicate observer of nature - a genuine observer, which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her special child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness. He has more than a tincture of literature; a deep and true taste for poetry. He is a good writer: true, minute, and literal in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as the letter of what he sees….there are passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in him. There is a basis of good sense and moral truth throughout, which is also a reflection of his character….On the whole, I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know….he is one of the few persons with whom to hold a conversation is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest tree, and with all his wild freedom, there is a high and classic cultivation in him too.
A truth-speaker capable of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship but almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home….The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.
Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance… I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau...