TOUCHES OF NATURE 49 
tached to the city and the life of the street and tay- 
ern as the other to the country and the life of ani- 
mals and plants. Yet they are close akin. They 
give out the same tone and are pitched in about the 
same key. Their methods are the same; so are 
their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric. Thoreau 
has the drier humor, as might be expected, and is 
less stomachic. There is more juice and unction in 
Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality. Both 
are essayists who in a less reflective age would have 
been poets pure and simple. Both were spare, high- 
nosed men, and I fancy a resemblance even in their 
portraits. Thoreau is the Lamb of New England 
fields and woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of Lon- 
don streets and clubs. There was a willfulness and 
perversity about Thoreau, behind which he concealed 
his shyness and his thin skin, and there was a simi- 
lar foil in Lamb, though less marked, on account of 
his good-nature; that was a part of his armor, too. 
VI 
Speaking of Thoreau’s dry humor reminds me 
how surely the old English unctuous and sympa- 
thetic humor is dying out or has died out of our 
literature. Our first notable crop of authors had it, 
— Paulding, Cooper, Irving, and in a measure Haw- 
thorne, — but cur later humorists have it not at all, 
but in its stead an intellectual quickness and _ per- 
ception of the ludicrous that is not unmixed with 
scorn. 
One of the marks of the great humorist, like Cer- 
