HENRY THOREAU
thy with animals, now, as compared with these seventy years ago. Yet to-day the inestimable value of frequent solitude is much overlooked.
He devoutly listened. He writes in his Journal: “If I do not keep step with others, it is because I hear a different drummer. Let a man step to the music which he hears, however measured, and however far away.”
Again: “If within the old man there is not a young man, — within the sophisticated one, an unsophisticated one, — then he is but one of the Devil's angels.”
When we read the poems that have become great classics describing the man, pure, constant and upright; David's “Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle?” the “Integer Vitæ” of Horace, Sir Henry Wotton's —
“How happy is he born and taught.
Who serveth not another's will”; —
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