THOREAU. 155 



taire said of Rousseau, that he almost persuaded us to go on 

 all fours, while the wiser fates were making it possible for us 

 to walk erect for the first time. Had he conversed more with 

 his fellows, his sympathies would have widened with the assur 

 ance that his peculiar genius had more appreciation, and his 

 writings a larger circle of readers, or at least a warmer one, than 

 he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony* to the natural 

 sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper, and in his 

 books an equally irrefragable one to the rare quality of his 

 mind. He was not a strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet 

 his mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light 

 snow has fallen everywhere in which he seems to come on the 

 track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave no trace. 

 We think greater compression would have done more for his 

 fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read so much. 

 Trifles are recorded with an over-minute punctuality and con 

 scientiousness of detail. He records the state of his personal 

 thermometer thirteen times a day. We cannot help thinking 

 sometimes of the man who 



Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats 

 To learn but catechisms and alphabets 

 Of unconcerning things, matters of fact,] 



and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that when the 

 owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a 

 hole/ We could readily part with some of his affectations. It 

 was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once for all, When I 

 was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy ; not so well for Thoreau to 

 travesty it into When I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria. 

 A naive thing said over again is anything but naive. &quot; But with 

 every exception, there is no writing comparable with Thoreau s 

 in kind, that is comparable with it in degree where it is best ; 

 where it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled roots and 

 dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and 

 smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand 

 and lovely in both worlds. 



George Sand says neatly, that Art is not a study of positive 

 reality, (actuality were the fitter word,) but a seeking after ideal 

 truth. It would be doing very inadequate justice to Thoreau if 

 we left it to be inferred that this ideal element did not exist in 

 him, and that too in larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his 

 nature-worship. He took nature as the mountain-path to an 

 ideal world. If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faith- 



* Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the Excursions. 



