HENEY D. THOEEATT 6 



his influence. If lie had lived farther from him, 

 he would have felt his attraction less. But he was 

 just as positive a fact as Emerson. The contour 

 of his moral nature was just as firm and resisting. 

 He was no more a soft-shelled egg, to be dented 

 by every straw in the nest, than was his distin- 

 guished neighbor. 



An English reviewer has summed up his estimate 

 of Thoreau by calling him a "skulker," which is the 

 pith of Dr. Johnson's smart epigram about Cowley, 

 a man in whom Thoreau is distinctly foreshadowed : 

 "If his activity was virtue, his retreat was coward- 

 ice." Thoreau was a skulker if it appears that he 

 ran away from a noble part to perform an ignoble, 

 or one less noble. The world has a right to the 

 best there is in a man, both in word and deed, — 

 from the scholar, knowledge; from the soldier, 

 courage; from the statesman, wisdom; from the 

 farmer, good husbandry, etc. ; and from all, virtue : 

 but has it a right to say arbitrarily who shall be 

 soldiers and who poets? Is there no virtue but 

 virtue ? no religion but in the creeds 1 no salt but 

 what is crystallized? Who shall presume to say 

 the world did not get the best there was in Thoreau, 

 — high and much-needed service from him, — 

 albeit there appear in the account more kicks than 

 compliments ? Would you have had him stick to 

 his lead-pencils, or to school-teaching, and let Wal- 

 den Pond and the rest go ? We should have lost 

 some of the raciest and most antiseptic books in 

 English literature, and an example of devotion to 



