143 THOREAU. 



a consciousness that forbids all naturalness for ever. It is 

 as easy and no easier to be natural in a salon as in a 

 swamp, if one do not aim at it, for what we call unnatural- 

 ness always has its spring in a man s thinking too much 

 about himself. &quot;It is impossible,&quot; said Turgot, &quot;for a 

 vulgar man to be simple.&quot; 



We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism 

 about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom 

 of the general liver-complaint. To a man of wholesome 

 constitution the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a 

 vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those who have most 

 loudly advertised their passion for seclusion and their 

 intimacy with nature, from Petrarch down, have been 

 mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, misanthropes on the 

 spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion of themselves by 

 professing contempt for their kind. They make demands 

 on the world in advance proportioned to their inward 

 measure of their own merit, and are angry that the world 

 pays only by the visible measure of performance. It is 

 true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, true of 

 Saint Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, 

 his grandchild, the inventor, we might almost say, of the 

 primitive forest, and who first was touched by the solemn 

 falling of a tree from natural decay in the windless silence 

 of the woods. It is a very shallow view that affirms trees 

 and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that men in com 

 munities are just as true to the laws of their organisation 

 and destiny ; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but 

 not the fool and the knave ; that would shun politics 

 because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench of tho 

 obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more wonder 

 ful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of 

 her works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with 

 men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare gained it, or with one s 

 own soul among men, as Dante, is the most delightful, as it 

 is the most precious, of all. In outward nature it is still 

 man that interests us, and we care far less for the things 

 seen than the way in which poetic eyes like Wordsworth s 



