J54 THOREAU. 



Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grand 

 child, the inventor, we might almost say, of the primitive forest, 

 and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree from 

 natural decay in the windless silence of the woods. It is a very 

 shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and 

 cannot see that men in communities are just as true to the laws 

 of their organisation and destiny ; that can tolerate the puffin 

 and the fox, but not the fool and the knave ; that would shun 

 politics because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench of 

 the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more wonder 

 ful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of her 

 works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with men, 

 as Montaigne and Shakespeare gained it, or with one s own soul 

 among men, as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is the most 

 precious, of all. In outward nature it is still man that interests 

 us, and we care far less for the things seen than the way in which 

 poetic eyes like Wordsworth s or Thoreau s see them, and the 

 reflections they cast there. To hear the to-do that is often 

 made over the simple fact that a man sees the image of himself 

 in the outward world, one is reminded of a savage when he for 

 the first time catches a glimpse of himself in a looking glass 

 Venerable child of Nature, we are tempted to say, to whose 

 science in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to whose art in the 

 tattooing of thine undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, 

 we are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle thou beholdest 

 is sold in my unhappy country for a shilling ! If matters go 

 on as they have done, and everybody must needs blab of all the 

 favours that have been done him by roadside and river brink 

 and woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell were no longer treachery, 

 it will be a positive refreshment to meet a man who is as 

 superbly indifferent to nature as she is to him. By and by we 

 shall have John Smith, of No. 12, I2th Street, advertising that 

 he is not the J. S. who saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as he 

 never saw one in his life, would not see one if he could, and is 

 prepared to prove an alibi on the day in question. 



Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to have been 

 \/ sanitary or sweetening in its influence on Thoreau s character. 

 On the contrary, his letters show him more cynical as he grew 

 older. While he studied with respectful attention the minks 

 and woodchucks, his neighbours, he looked with utter contempt 

 on the august drama of destiny of which his country was the 

 scene, and on which the curtain had already risen. He was 

 converting us back to a state of nature &amp;lt; so eloquently, as Vol- 



