200 THOREAU. 



tempter Uselessness. He had no faculty of generaliza- 

 tion from outside of himself, or at least no experience 

 which would supf)ly the material of such, and he makes 

 his own whim the law, his own range the horizon of the 

 universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of 

 whose satisfactions he had never had the means of test^ 

 ing, and we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of 

 Timon. He had little active imagination ; of the recep- 

 tive he had much. His appreciation is of the highest 

 quality ; his critical power, from want of continuity of 

 mind, very limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites 

 a simile from Ossian, as an example of the superiority 

 of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the 

 historic evidence less convincing, the sentimental melan- 

 choly of those poems should be conclusive of their mod- 

 ernness. He had no artistic power such as controls a 

 great work to the serene balance of completeness, but 

 exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences 

 and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse for 

 the expression of a detached thought, sentiment, or 

 image. His works give one the feeling of a sky full of 

 stars, — something impressive and exhilarating certainl}^, 

 something high overhead and freckled thickly with spots 

 of isolated brightness ; but whether these have any 

 mutual relation with each other, or have any concern 

 with our mundane matters, is for the most part matter 

 of conjecture, — astrology as yet, and not astronomy. 



It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards 

 became, that he was not by nature an observer. He 

 only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet 

 than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he 

 did not know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till 

 he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent 

 wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country 

 boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as 



