but the character of a person as a whole he never copied. It is a strange
comment on his powerful writing that so much should have been made of his
superficial realism, while the persistent and profound romanticism of his
work is too often overlooked. Yet this was one of the weird results of his
genius, that his imagination weaves for itself a world more real than life
itself, and that claims for itself an acceptance as truer to facts than
the word of the historian.

In his paper on Emerson, Curtis gives further account of his life in
Concord. He said that "Thoreau lives in the berry-pastures upon a bank
over Walden Pond, and in a little house of his own building. One pleasant
summer afternoon a small party of us helped him raise it--a bit of life as
Arcadian as any at Brook Farm. Elsewhere in the village he turns up
arrow-heads abundantly, and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau initiated him
into the mystery of finding them." His account of the club which gathered
for a few evenings in Emerson's study deserves to be placed here in order
to complete his story of Concord experiences, the fictitious names used by
him being changed to the real ones:

"It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and
differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in
Concord. Towards the end of the autumn, Mr. Emerson suggested that they
should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his library.
'Monsieur Aubepine,' 'Miles Coverdale,' and other phantoms, since known as
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the Old Manse; the inflexible Henry
Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then living among the blackberry
pastures of Walden Pond; Plato Skimpole [Margaret Fuller's name for
Alcott], then sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses in a little
house on the Boston Road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and Brook Farmer
[George Bradford], then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added the