This chapter might easily be extended into a volume, so long was the list of his companions, and so intimate and perfect his relation with them, at least on his own side.
"A truth-speaker he," said Emerson at his funeral, "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."
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE WALDEN HERMITAGE.
It is by his two years' encampment on the shore of a small lake in the Walden woods, a mile south of Concord village, that Thoreau is best known to the world; and the book which relates how he lived and what he saw there is still, as it always was, the most popular of his writings. Like all his books, it contains much that might as well have been written on any other subject; but it also describes charmingly the scenes and events of his sylvan life,—his days and nights with Nature. He spent two years and a half in this retreat, though often coming forth from it.
The localities of Concord which Thoreau immortalized were chiefly those in the neighborhood of some lake or stream,—though it would be hard to find in that well-watered town, especially in springtime, any place which is not neighbor either to the nine-times circling river Musketaquid, to the swifter Assabet,
"That like an arrowe clear
Through Troy rennest aie downward to the sea,"—
to Walden or White Pond, to Bateman's Pond, to the Mill Brook, the Sanguinetto, the Nut-Meadow, or the Second Division Brook. All these waters and more are renowned again and again in Thoreau's books. Like Icarus, the ancient high-flyer, he tried his fortune upon many a river, fiord, streamlet, and broad sea,—
"Where still the shore his brave attempt resounds."