144 THOREAU. 



He had no artistic power such as controls a great work 

 to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite 

 mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, 

 or (more rarely) short bits of verse for the expression 

 of a detached thought, sentiment, or image. His works 

 give one the feeling of a sky full of stars, something 

 impressive and exhilarating certainly, something high 

 overhead and freckled thickly with spots of isolated 

 brightness; but whether these have any mutual relation 

 with each other, or have any concern with our mundane 

 matters, is for the most part matter of conjecture, 

 astrology as yet, and not astronomy. 



It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards 

 became, that he was not by nature an observer. He 

 only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet 

 than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he 

 did not know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till 

 he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent 

 wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. 

 At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new 

 discovery, though one should have thought that its gold- 

 dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. 

 Neither his attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous 

 kind. He discovered nothing. He thought everything a 

 discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting of 

 acorns and nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his 

 character, but one of his chief charms as a writer. 

 Everything grows fresh under his hand. He delved in his 

 mind and nature ; he planted them with all manner of 

 native and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was 

 not merely solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded at 

 last in almost persuading himself that he was autochthonous. 

 He valued everything in proportion as he fancied it to be 

 exclusively his own. He complains in &quot; Walden,&quot; that there 

 is 110 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 



