THOREAU. 201 



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 moon- 

 light 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 per- 

 suading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued 

 everything in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusive- 

 ly his own. He complains in " Walden," that there is 

 no 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 intel- 

 lectual selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful in 

 reading him. He lacked that generosity of " communi- 

 cation " which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey 

 tells us that Wordsworth was impatient when any one 

 else spoke of mountains, as if he had a peculiar property 

 in them. And we can readily understand why it should 

 be so : no one is satisfied with another's appreciation of 

 his mistress. But Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty 

 way of thinking (often we should be inclined to call it a 

 remote one) not so much because it was good in itself as 

 because he wished few to share it with him. It seems 

 now and then as if he did not seek to lure others up 

 " above our lower region of turmoil," but to leave his 

 own name cut on the mountain peak as the first climber. 

 This itch of originality infects his thought and style. 

 To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns common- 

 places end for end, and fancies it makes something new 



