THOREAU. 151 



larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. 

 He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. 

 If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faithfully 

 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 Dio 

 genes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau s experiment actually 

 presupposed all that complicated civilisation which it theo 

 retically 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 accomplice in the 

 sin of that artificial civilisation which rendered it possible 

 that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. 

 Magnis to/men excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a use 

 ful one, in the direction of &quot; plain living and high thinking.&quot; 

 It was a practical sermon on Emerson s text that &quot; things 

 are in the saddle and ride mankind,&quot; an attempt to solve 

 Oarlyle s problem (condensed from Johnson) of &quot; lessening 

 your denominator.&quot; His whole life was a rebuke of the 

 waste and aimlessness of our American luxury, which is an 

 abject enslavement to tawdry upholstery. He had &quot; fine 

 translunary things&quot; 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 



