202 THOREAU. 



of them. As we walk down Park Street, our eye is 

 caught by Dr. Windship's dumb-bells, one of which 

 bears an inscription testifying that it is the heaviest 

 ever put up at arm's length by any athlete ; and in 

 reading Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling as 

 if he sometimes invited our attention to a particular 

 sophism or paradox as the biggest yet maintained by 

 an}^ single writer. He seeks, at all risks, for perversity 

 of thought, and revives the age of concetti while he 

 fancies himself going back to a pre-classical nature. " A 

 day," he says, " passed in the society of those Greek 

 sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, 

 would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed 

 cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss- 

 beds." It is not so much the True that he loves as the 

 Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in 

 other men by exaggeration of jjhrase, so in him by ex- 

 travagance of statement. He wishes always to trump 

 your suit and to ruff when you least expect it. Do you 

 love Nature because she is beautiful ? He will find a 

 better argument in her ugliness. Are you tired of the 

 artificial man? He instantly dresses you up an ideal in 

 a Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of 

 his otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are 

 common to all woodsmen, white or red, and this simply 

 because he has not studied the pale-faced variety. 



This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could 

 have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man can- 

 not escape in thought, any more than he can in language, 

 from the past and the present. As no one ever invents 

 a word, and yet language somehow grows by general 

 contribution and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr. 

 Thoreau seems to us to insist in public on going back to 

 flint and steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket 

 which he knows very well how to use at a pinch. Origi- 



