THOREAU. 147 



before any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind, 

 the world is a constant challenge of opportunity. Mr. 

 Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not have been 

 so fond of prescribing. His whole life was a search for the 

 doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense of what the 

 world was worth. They ordained a severe apprenticeship 

 to law, and even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of 

 freedom and mastery over these. Seven years of service 

 for Rachel were to be rewarded at last with Leah. Seven 

 other years of faithfulness with her were to win them at 

 last the true bride of their souls. Active Life was with 

 them the only path to the Contemplative. 



Thoreau had no humour, and this implies that he was a 

 sorry logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds 

 thought with style when he undertakes to speak of the 

 latter. He was for ever talking of getting away from the 

 world, but he must always be near enough to it, nay, to the 

 Concord corner of it, to feel the impression he makes there. 

 He verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte-Beuve, &quot; On touche 

 encore a son temps et tresfort, meme quand on le repousse.&quot; 

 This egotism of his is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion 

 which keeps him in the public eye. The dignity of man is 

 an excellent thing, but therefore to hold one s self too 

 sacred and precious is the reverse of excellent. There is 

 something delightfully absurd in six volumes addressed to 

 a world of such &quot; vulgar fellows &quot; as Thoreau affirmed his 

 fellow-men to be. We once had a glimpse of a genuine 

 solitary who spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles 

 beyond all human communication, and there dwelt with 

 his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the 

 shanty on Walden Pond has something the air, it must be 

 confessed, of the Hermitage of La Chevrette. We do not 

 believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism carries one 

 into the woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps the 

 narrowest provincialism is that of Self ; that of Kleinwinkel 

 is nothing to it. The natural man, like the singing birds, 

 comes out of the forest as inevitably as the natural bear 

 and the wild-cat stick there. To seek to be natural implies 



