THOREAU. 143 



seedlings swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the fine 

 natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange books 

 these are of his, and interesting in many ways, instructive 

 chiefly as showing how considerable a crop may be raised on 

 a comparatively narrow close of mind, and how much a man 

 may make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though 

 perhaps never truly finding it at last. 



We have just been renewing our recollection of Mr. 

 Thoreau s writings, and have read through his six volumes 

 in the order of their production. We shall try to give an 

 adequate report of their impression upon us both as critic 

 and as mere reader. He seems to us to have been a man 

 with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without 

 questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and 

 weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to 

 himself. Was he indolent, he finds none of the activities 

 which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of him. 

 Was he wanting in the qualities that make success, it is 

 success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks 

 persistency and purpose. Was he poor, money was an 

 unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns 

 doing good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be 

 of use was with him the most killing bait of the wily 

 tempter Uselessness. He had 110 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. 



