Thoreau writes in his journal:
A man’s life should be a stately march to a sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure, or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the Melody runs into such depth and wildness as to he no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times, for then the Music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to Thomas Carlyle:
In this number what say you to the Elegy [i.e. “Sympathy”] written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives near me,—Henry Thoreau? A criticism on Persius is his also (The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, 273).
