156 THOREAU. 



fully every trip over a root, if he botanise somewhat wearisomely, 

 he gives us now and then superb outlooks from some jutting 

 crag, and brings us out at last into an illimitable ether, where 

 the breathing is not difficult for those who have any true touch 

 of the climbing spirit. His shanty-life was a mere impossibility, 

 so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency 

 of mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. 

 Thoreau s experiment actually presupposed all that complicated 

 civilisation which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on 

 another man s land ; he borrows an axe ; his boards, his nails, 

 his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his 

 plough, his hoe, all turn state s evidence against him as an ac 

 complice in the sin of that artificial civilisation which rendered 

 it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist 

 at all. Magnis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was ajQp.ble.and 

 a useful one, in the direction of * plain living and high thinking. 

 It was a practical sermon on Emerson s text that things are in 

 the saddle and ride mankind, an attempt to solve Carlyle s 

 problem (condensed from Johnson) of lessening your denomi 

 nator. His whole life was a rebuke of the waste and aimless- 

 ness of our American luxury, which is an abject enslavement to 

 tawdry upholstery. He had fine translunary things in him. 

 His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and 

 purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but 

 to be a master is to be a master. He had caught his English at 

 its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best 

 days; his literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations 

 are always nuggets of the purest ore: there are sentences of his 

 as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly 

 crystallised; his metaphors and images are always fresh from 

 the soil ; he had watched Nature like a detective who is to go 

 upon the stand ; as we read him, it seems as if all out-of-doors 

 had kept a diary and become its own Montaigne ; we look at 

 the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass ; compared with 

 his, all other books of similar aim, even White s Selborne, seem 

 dry as a country clergyman s meteorological journal in an old 

 almanac. /He belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; 

 if not with the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller 

 class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible 

 thought-seed like ferns, 



