“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.” “Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is sexton to all the world.” “How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?” “Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to expectations.” “I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.” There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a _Gnaphalium_ like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens), climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the _Gnaphalium leontopodium_, but by the Swiss _Edelweisse_, which signifies _Noble Purity_. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. 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. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 15: Part of this paper was the Address delivered by Mr. Emerson at the funeral of Mr. Thoreau, in May, 1862. In the following summer it was enlarged and printed in the “Atlantic Monthly” in its present form.] [Footnote 16: _Walden_: p. 20.] CARLYLE. HOLD with the Maker, not the Made, Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad. CARLYLE.[17] THOMAS CARLYLE is an immense talker, as extraordinary in his conversation as in his writing,--I think even more so.