TOUCHES OF NATUEE 49 



tached to the city and the life of the street and tav- 

 ern as the other to the country and the life of ani- 

 mals and plants. Yet they are close akin. They 

 give out the same tone and are pitched in about the 

 same key. Their methods are the same; so are 

 their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric. Thoreau 

 has the drier humor, as might be expected, and is 

 less stomachic. There is more juice and unction in 

 Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality. Both 

 are essayists who in a less reflective age would have 

 been poets pure and simple. Both were spare, high- 

 nosed men, and I fancy a resemblance even in their 

 portraits. Thoreau is the Lamb of New England 

 fields and woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of Lon- 

 don streets and clubs. There was a willfulness and 

 perversity about Thoreau, behind which he concealed 

 his shyness and his thin skin, and there was a simi- 

 lar foil in Lamb, though less marked, on account of 

 his good-nature; that was a part of his armor, too. 



VI 



Speaking of Thoreau's dry humor reminds me 

 how surely the old English unctuous and sympa- 

 thetic humor is dying out or has died out of our 

 literature. Our first notable crop of authors had it, 

 — Paulding, Cooper, Irving, and in a measure Haw- 

 thorne, — but our later humorists have it not at all, 

 but in its stead an intellectual quickness and per- 

 ception of the ludicrous that is not unmixed with 

 scorn. 



One of the marks of the great humorist, like Cer- 



