8 INDOOE STUDIES 



needs none of your respect." It was just such 

 radical qualities as John Brown exhibited, or their 

 analogue and counterpart in other fields, that Tho- 

 reau coveted and pursued through life: in man, 

 devotion to the severest ideal, friendship founded 

 upon antagonism, or hate, as he preferred to call it; 

 in nature the untamed and untamable, even verging 

 on the savage and pitiless ; in literature the heroic, 

 — "books, not which afford us a cowering enjoy- 

 ment, but in which each thought is of unusual 

 daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a 

 timid one would not be entertained by." Indeed, 

 Thoreau was Brown's spiritual brother, the last and 

 finer flowering of the same plant, — the seed flower- 

 ing: he was just as much of a zealot, was just as 

 gritty and unflinching in his way; a man whose 

 brow was set, whose mind was made up, and lead- 

 ing just as forlorn a hope, and as little quailed by 

 the odds. 



In the great army of Mammon, the great army 

 of the fashionable, the complacent and church-go- 

 ing, Thoreau was a skulker, even a deserter, if you 

 please, — yea, a traitor fighting on the other side. 



Emerson regrets the loss to the world of his rare 

 powers of action, and thinks that, instead of being 

 the captain of a huckleberry-party, he might have 

 engineered for all America. But Thoreau, doubt- 

 less, knew himself better when he said, with his 

 usual strength of metaphor, that he was as unfit for 

 the coarse uses of this world as gossamer for ship- 

 timber. A man who believes that "life should be 



