150 THOREAU. 



lessness. He had no faculty of generalisation from outside of 

 himself, or at least no experience which would supply the 

 material of such, and he makes his own whim the law, his own 

 range the horizon of the universe. He condemns a world, the 

 hollowness of whose satisfactions he had never had the means 

 of testing, and we recognise Apemantus behind the mask of 

 Timon. He had little active imagination ; of the receptive he 

 had much. His appreciation is of the highest quality; his 

 critical power, from want of continuity of mind, very limited 

 and inadequate. He somewhere cites a simile from Ossian, as 

 an example of the superiority of the old poetry to the new, 

 though, even were the historic evidence less convincing, the 

 sentimental melancholy of those poems should be conclusive of 

 their modernness. He had no artistic power such as controls a 

 great work to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite 

 mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, 

 or (more rarely) short bits of verse for the expression of a de 

 tached thought, sentiment, or image. His works give one the 

 feeling of a sky full of stars, something impressive and ex 

 hilarating certainly, something high overhead and freckled 

 thickly with spots of isolated brightness ; but whether these 

 have any mutual relation with each other, or have any concern 

 with our mundane matters, is for the most part matter of con 

 jecture, astrology as yet, and not astronomy. 



It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards became, 

 that he was not by nature an observer. He only saw the things 

 he looked for, and was less poet than naturalist. Till he built 

 his Walden shanty, he did not know that the hickory grew in 

 Concord. Till he went to Maine, he had never seen phospho 

 rescent wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country 

 boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new 

 discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of 

 blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Neither his 

 attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind. He dis 

 covered nothing. He thought everything a discovery of his 

 own, from moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts by 

 squirrels. This is a defect in his character, but one of his chief 

 charms as a writer. Everything grows fresh under his hand. 

 He delved in his mind and nature ; he planted them with all 

 manner of native and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. 

 He was not merely solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded 

 at last in almost persuading himself that he was autochthonous. 

 He valued everything in proportion as he fancied it to be ex- 



