George F. Hoar

He was a moody and solitary person, except in the company of a few close friends who testified to the charming and delightful quality of his companionship.

He once told us that it was wicked to eat animal food; that the animal had the same right to his life that we had to ours, and we had no right to destroy the lives of any of God's creatures for our own purposes.

When the female is on her nest the male woodcock flies straight up into the sky, folds his wings and falls down through the air, coming down within a foot or two of the nest from which he ascended, pouring out a beautiful song, which he…

He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes' broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him; What others did at distance hear, And guessed within the thicket's gloom, Was shown to…

It seemed as if the breezes brought him; It seemed as if the sparrows taught him; As if by secret sight he knew Where, in the far fields, the orchis grew.

We used to say that if anything happened in the deep woods which only came about once in a hundred years, Henry Thoreau would be sure to be on the spot at the time and know the whole story.

But he knew birds and beasts as one boy knows another--all their delightful little habits and fashions.

He has fallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave.

He not only held conscience the guide of his life, but he took care to school and discipline that conscience so that its dictates should always conform to truth, to duty, to the laws of God.

He openly professed what he believed, and he acted up to his professions.

He had formed in his own mind a standard of education far beyond that which can be completed, even by the most faithful application, within the ordinary rounds of school and college--an education in which every man must be mainly his own…

But at the time of the hubbub against me in Boston, Charles Emerson stood alone of a large company in defence of free thought and speech, and declared that he had rather see Boston in ashes than that I or anybody should be debarred in any…

It seems no longer worth living in, if whatever delights us in it departs.

I never shall hear such speaking as his, for his memory was a garden of immortal flowers, and all his reading came up to him as he talked, to clear, elevate and decorate the subject of his present thought.

I mourn for the Commonwealth, which has lost before it yet had learned his name the promise of his eloquence and rare public gifts.

I deferred to him on so many questions and trusted him more than myself, that I feel as if I had lost the best part of myself.

Yesterday afternoon we attended his funeral, and that is the end on this side Heaven, of his extraordinary promise, the union of such shining gifts,--grace and genius, and sense and virtue.

I think the impression he made upon all who knew him was that of a classical scholar and a perfect gentleman.

The fawn of Marvell's imagination survives in my memory as the fitting image to recall this beautiful youth; a soul glowing like the rose of morning with enthusiasm, a character white as the lilies in its purity.

I felt as many have felt after being with his brother, Ralph Waldo, that I had entertained an angel visitant.

A beautiful, high-souled, pure, exquisitely delicate nature in a slight but finely wrought mortal frame, he was for me the very ideal of an embodied celestial intelligence.

It may be a fond exaggeration, but I think he was the most brilliant intellect ever born in Massachusetts.

When he died, every schoolboy thought he had lost a friend.

Indeed, I think he would have said that the town had more influence upon him than he had upon it.

Lowell said that these three names shine among all others in American literature as the three blazing stars in the belt of Orion shine in the sky.