THOREAU. 151 



clusively his own. He complains in Walden, that there is no 

 one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental literature, 

 though the man was living within two miles of his hut who had 

 introduced him to it. This intellectual selfishness becomes 

 sometimes almost painful in reading him. He lacked that 

 generosity of communication which Johnson admired in 

 Burke. De Quincey tells us that Wordsworth was impatient 

 wihen any one else spoke of mountains, as if he had a peculiar 

 property in them. And we can readily understand why it should 

 be so : no one is satisfied with another s appreciation of his 

 mistress. But Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty way of 

 thinking (often we should be inclined to call it a remote one) 

 not so much because it was good in itself as because he wished 

 few to share it with him. It seems now and then as if he did 

 not seek to lure others up t above our lower region of turmoil, 

 but to leave his own name cut on the mountain peak as the first 

 climber. This itch of originality infects his thought and style. 

 T^o be misty is not to be mystic. He turns common-places end 

 for end, and fancies it makes something new of them. As we 

 walk down Park Street, our eye is caught by Dr. Windship s 

 dumb-bells, one of which bears an inscription testifying that it 

 is the heaviest ever put up at arm s length by any athlete ; and in 

 reading Mr. Thoreau s books we cannot help feeling as if he 

 sometimes invited our attention to a particular sophism or para 

 dox, as the biggest yet maintained by any single writer. He 

 seeks, at all risks, for perversity of thought, and revives the age 

 of concetti while he fancies himself going back to a pre-classical 

 nature. A day, he says, passed in the society of those Greek 

 sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would 

 not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines 

 and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds. It is not so much 

 the True that he loves as the Out-of-the-way. As the Brazen 

 Age shows itself in other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in 

 him by extravagance of statement. He wishes always to trump 

 your suit and to n^when you least expect it. Do you love 

 Nature because she is beautiful ? He will find a better argu 

 ment in her ugliness. Are you tired of the artificial man ? He 

 instantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot Indian, and 

 attributes to this creature of his otherwise-mindedness as pecu 

 liarities things that are common to all woodsmen, white or red, 

 and this simply because he has not studied the pale-faced variety. 

 This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could have a 

 patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot escape in 



