208 THOREAU. 



Assyria." A naive thing said over again is anything but 

 naive. But with every exception, there is no writing 

 comparable with Thoreau's in kind, that is comparable 

 with it in degree where it is best ; where it disengages 

 itself, that is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of 

 a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and smooth 

 and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand 

 and lovely in both worlds. 



George Sand says neatly, that " Art is not a study of 

 positive reality," (actuality were the fitter word,) "but a 

 seeking after ideal truth." It would be doing very inad- 

 equate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that 

 this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in 

 larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-wor- 

 ship. 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 botanize 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 Diogenes had a sounder bottom. 

 Thoreau's experiment actually presupposed all that com- 

 plicated civilization which it theoretically 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 civilization which rendered it possible that such 

 a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Mag- 

 nis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful 

 one, in the direction of "plain living and high thinking." 

 It was a practical sermon on Emerson's text that " things 



