THOREAU. 209 



are in the saddle and ride mankind," an attempt to 

 solve Carlyle's problem (condensed from Johnson) of 

 "lessening your denominator." His whole life was a 

 rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our American 

 luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry up- 

 holstery. He had " fine translunary things " 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 mas- 

 ter. 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 crystallized ; his metaphors and images are al- 

 ways 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 be- 

 come its own Montaigne ; we look at the landscape as in 

 a Claude Lorraine glass ; compared with his, all other 

 books of similar aim, even White's " Selborne," seem dry 

 as a country clergyman's meteorological journal in an old 

 almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and No- 

 valis if not with the originally creative men, with the 

 scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves 

 shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns. 



