12 INDOOR STUDIES 



hopes and imaginings. He says to his friend, 

 "Hold fast your most indefinite waking dream." 

 Emerson says his life was an attempt to pluck the 

 Swiss e delweis^ from the all but inaccessible cliffs. 

 The higher and the wilder, the more the fascination 

 for him. Indeed, the loon, the moose, the beaver, 

 were but faint types and symbols of the wildness 

 he coveted and would have reappear in his life and 

 books ; not the cosmical, the universal, — he was 

 not great enough for that, — but simply the wild as 

 distinguished from the domestic and the familiar, 

 the remote and the surprising as contrasted with 

 the hackneyed and the commonplace, arrow-heads 

 as distinguished from whetstones or jaekknives. 



Thoreau was Prench on one side and Puritan on 

 the other. It was probably the wild, untamable 

 French core in him — a dash of the gray wolf that 

 stalks through his ancestral folk-lore, as in Audubon 

 and the Canadian voyageurs — that made him turn 

 with such zest and such genius to aboriginal nature ; 

 and it was the Puritan element in him — strong, 

 grim, uncompromising, almost heartless — that held 

 him to such high, austere, moral, and ideal ends. 

 His genius was Saxon in its homeliness and sin- 

 cerity, in its directness and scorn of rhetoric; but 

 that wild revolutionary cry of his, and that sort of 

 restrained ferocity and hirsuteness, are more ^French. 

 He said in one of his letters, when he was but 

 twenty-four: "I grow savager and savager every 

 day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is 

 only the repose of untamableness. " But his sav- 



