The Days of a Man 



Thoreau 



Andersen's 

 tales 



Beauties 



of 



nature 



towns, delivering a talk on Bret Harte and the 

 Sierras, which I termed "The Men of No Account." 1 

 As a talk it was none too coherent, and it doubtless 

 went over the heads of the people; but it enabled 

 me to say some things I then thought true, and 

 probably some of them really were. On one occasion 

 I heard a critic declare : "There is too much sang-froid 

 in his talk too much sing-song, you know." 



But of all authors who influenced my thought and 

 writing while at Cornell, I should put Thoreau first. 

 Something about his crisp, crystalline sentences 

 always appealed to me. His love of nature, his 

 sharply defined silhouettes of the beasts and trees, 

 especially his appeals for personal freedom, made 

 on me a profound impression. His address on John 

 Brown, for example, affected me more than any 

 other political writing whatever; not so much 

 because of the tragedy which called it forth as for 

 the illumination thrown by it on Brown's life, 

 death, and purpose the suppression of all thought 

 of self, by which the man became "Old Brown no 

 longer, but an Angel of Light." 



Curiously enough, another writer who influenced 

 me was Hans Christian Andersen. The simple, 

 gentle phraseology of his fairy tales suggested a 

 style which I have sometimes used for children's 

 stories as well as for grown-up satire. 



One other great source of inspiration, not alien 

 to that derived from good literature, lay open to us 

 in the natural beauty of environment, especially in 

 the three fine months of our New York year, May, 



1 At about the same time Anderson went among the people with a lecture 

 on Milton, walking home four miles one night with a package of shirts in lieu 

 of a fee. 



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