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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Harvest, by John Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Last Harvest
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: July 25, 2006 [EBook #18903]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST HARVEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+
+                           THE LAST HARVEST
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+
+                            JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+
+
+
+                         BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+                    The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+                                 1922
+
+
+
+             COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+    _But who is he with modest looks
+      And clad in homely russet brown?
+    He murmurs near the running brooks
+      A music sweeter than their own.
+
+    He is retired as noontide dew,
+      Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
+    And you must love him, ere to you
+      He will seem worthy of your love.
+
+    The outward shows of sky and earth,
+      Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+    And impulses of deeper birth
+      Have come to him in solitude.
+
+    In common things that round us lie
+      Some random truths he can impart--
+    The harvest of a quiet eye
+      That broods and sleeps on his own heart._
+
+WORDSWORTH
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Most of the papers garnered here were written after fourscore
+years--after the heat and urge of the day--and are the fruit of a long
+life of observation and meditation.
+
+The author's abiding interest in Emerson is shown in his close and
+eager study of the Journals during these later years. He hungered for
+everything that concerned the Concord Sage, who had been one of the
+most potent influences in his life. Although he could discern flies in
+the Emersonian amber, he could not brook slight or indifference toward
+Emerson in the youth of to-day. Whatever flaws he himself detected, he
+well knew that Emerson would always rest secure on the pedestal where
+long ago he placed him. Likewise with Thoreau: If shortcomings were to
+be pointed out in this favorite, he wished to be the one to do it. And
+so, before taking Thoreau to task for certain inaccuracies, he takes
+Lowell to task for criticizing Thoreau. He then proceeds, not without
+evident satisfaction, to call attention to Thoreau's "slips" as an
+observer and reporter of nature; yet in no carping spirit, but, as he
+himself has said: "Not that I love Thoreau less, but that I love truth
+more."
+
+The "Short Studies in Contrasts," the "Day by Day" notes,
+"Gleanings," and the "Sundown Papers" which comprise the latter part
+of this, the last, posthumous volume by John Burroughs, were written
+during the closing months of his life. Contrary to his custom, he
+wrote these usually in the evening, or, less frequently, in the early
+morning hours, when, homesick and far from well, with the ceaseless
+pounding of the Pacific in his ears, and though incapable of the
+sustained attention necessary for his best work, he was nevertheless
+impelled by an unwonted mental activity to seek expression.
+
+If the reader misses here some of the charm and power of his usual
+writing, still may he welcome this glimpse into what John Burroughs
+was doing and thinking during those last weeks before the illness came
+which forced him to lay aside his pen.
+
+CLARA BARRUS
+
+WOODCHUCK LODGE
+
+ROXBURY-IN-THE-CATSKILLS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I.      EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS
+
+II.     FLIES IN AMBER
+
+III.    ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU
+
+IV.     A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN
+
+V.      WHAT MAKES A POEM?
+
+VI.     SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS:
+
+          The Transient and the Permanent
+
+          Positive and Negative
+
+          Palm and Fist
+
+          Praise and Flattery
+
+          Genius and Talent
+
+          Invention and Discovery
+
+          Town and Country
+
+VII.    DAY BY DAY
+
+VIII.   GLEANINGS
+
+IX.     SUNDOWN PAPERS:
+
+          Re-reading Bergson
+
+          Revisions
+
+          Bergson and Telepathy
+
+          Meteoric Men and Planetary Men
+
+          The Daily Papers
+
+          The Alphabet
+
+          The Reds of Literature
+
+          The Evolution of Evolution
+
+          Following One's Bent
+
+          Notes on the Psychology of Old Age
+
+          Facing the Mystery
+
+        INDEX
+
+
+     The frontispiece portrait is from a photograph by Miss Mabel
+     Watson taken at Pasadena, California, shortly before Mr.
+     Burroughs's death.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST HARVEST
+
+I
+
+EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS
+
+I
+
+
+Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during
+his lifetime by the books he gave to the world. His Journals,
+published over a quarter of a century after his death, nearly or quite
+double the bulk of his writing, and while they do not rank in literary
+worth with his earlier works, they yet throw much light upon his life
+and character and it is a pleasure to me, in these dark and
+troublesome times,[1] and near the sun-down of my life, to go over
+them and point out in some detail their value and significance.
+
+[Footnote 1: Written during the World War.--C.B.]
+
+Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in
+the moral and religious development of our people, that attention
+cannot be directed to him too often. He could be entirely
+reconstructed from the unpublished matter which he left. Moreover,
+just to come in contact with him in times like ours is stimulating and
+refreshing. The younger generation will find that he can do them good
+if they will pause long enough in their mad skirting over the surface
+of things to study him.
+
+For my own part, a lover of Emerson from early manhood, I come back to
+him in my old age with a sad but genuine interest. I do not hope to
+find the Emerson of my youth--the man of daring and inspiring
+affirmation, the great solvent of a world of encrusted forms and
+traditions, which is so welcome to a young man--because I am no longer
+a young man. Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a
+formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are
+ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit. I find that something one
+gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
+It is a habit of mind, a test of values, a strengthening of one's
+faith in the essential soundness and goodness of creation. He helps to
+make you feel at home in nature, and in your own land and generation.
+He permanently exalts your idea of the mission of the poet, of the
+spiritual value of the external world, of the universality of the
+moral law, and of our kinship with the whole of nature.
+
+There is never any despondency or infirmity of faith in Emerson. He is
+always hopeful and courageous, and is an antidote to the pessimism and
+materialism which existing times tend to foster. Open anywhere in the
+Journals or in the Essays and we find the manly and heroic note. He
+is an unconquerable optimist, and says boldly, "Nothing but God can
+root out God," and he thinks that in time our culture will absorb the
+hells also. He counts "the dear old Devil" among the good things which
+the dear old world holds for him. He saw so clearly how good comes out
+of evil and is in the end always triumphant. Were he living in our
+day, he would doubtless find something helpful and encouraging to say
+about the terrific outburst of scientific barbarism in Europe.
+
+It is always stimulating to hear a man ask such a question as this,
+even though he essay no answer to it: "Is the world (according to the
+old doubt) to be criticized otherwise than as the best possible in the
+existing system, and the population of the world the best that soils,
+climate, and animals permit?"
+
+I note that in 1837 Emerson wrote this about the Germans; "I do not draw
+from them great influence. The heroic, the holy, I lack. They are
+contemptuous. They fail in sympathy with humanity. The voice of nature
+they bring me to hear is not divine, but ghastly, hard, and ironical.
+They do not illuminate me: they do not edify me." Is not this the German
+of to-day? If Emerson were with us now he would see, as we all see, how
+the age of idealism and spiritual power in Germany that gave the world
+the great composers and the great poets and philosophers--Bach,
+Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, and
+others--has passed and been succeeded by the hard, cruel, and sterile
+age of materialism, and the domination of an aggressive and
+conscienceless military spirit. Emerson was the poet and prophet of
+man's moral nature, and it is this nature--our finest and highest human
+sensibilities and aspirations toward justice and truth--that has been so
+raided and trampled upon by the chief malefactor and world outlaw in the
+present war.
+
+II
+
+Men who write Journals are usually men of certain marked traits--they
+are idealists, they love solitude rather than society, they are
+self-conscious, and they love to write. At least this seems to be true
+of the men of the past century who left Journals of permanent literary
+worth--Amiel, Emerson, and Thoreau. Amiel's Journal has more the
+character of a diary than has Emerson's or Thoreau's, though it is
+also a record of thoughts as well as of days. Emerson left more
+unprinted matter than he chose to publish during his lifetime.
+
+The Journals of Emerson and Thoreau are largely made up of left-overs
+from their published works, and hence as literary material, when
+compared with their other volumes, are of secondary importance. You
+could not make another "Walden" out of Thoreau's Journals, nor build
+up another chapter on "Self-Reliance," or on "Character," or on the
+"Over-Soul," from Emerson's, though there are fragments here and there
+in both that are on a level with their best work.
+
+Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles wondered that he did
+not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate
+habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles
+evidently was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly
+more fond of real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an
+orator and could not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write
+Journals, as I have said, are usually men of solitary habits, and
+their Journal largely takes the place of social converse. Amiel,
+Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely souls, lacking in social gifts, and
+seeking relief in the society of their own thoughts. Such men go to
+their Journals as other men go to their clubs. They love to be alone
+with themselves, and dread to be benumbed or drained of their mental
+force by uncongenial persons. To such a man his Journal becomes his
+duplicate self and he says to it what he could not say to his nearest
+friend. It becomes both an altar and a confessional. Especially is
+this true of deeply religious souls such as the men I have named. They
+commune, through their Journals, with the demons that attend them.
+Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence, "There is but one thing
+needful--to possess God," and Emerson's Journal in its most
+characteristic pages is always a search after God, or the highest
+truth.
+
+"After a day of humiliation and stripes," he writes, "if I can write
+it down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of
+joy, the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given
+me by all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of
+humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end."
+"I write my journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name
+of society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen."
+
+He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. At the age of thirty
+he said he had "no skill to live with men; that is, such men as the
+world is made of; and such as I delight in I seldom find." Again he
+says, aged thirty-two, "I study the art of solitude; I yield me as
+gracefully as I can to destiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a
+settled thing" that he and society shall be "nothing to each other."
+He takes to his Journal instead. It is his house of refuge.
+
+Yet he constantly laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the
+poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and
+of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal
+spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for
+many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run
+for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But he does
+not run away; he often takes it out in hoeing in his garden: "My good
+hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to
+bite my enemies." "In smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my temper.
+In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed
+deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said
+that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him
+resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his
+temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and
+trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no
+longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a
+visitor is by." We welcome these and many another bit of
+self-analysis: "I was born with a seeing eye and not a helping hand. I
+can only comfort my friends by thought, and not by love or aid." "I
+was made a hermit and am content with my lot. I pluck golden fruit
+from rare meetings with wise men." Margaret Fuller told him he seemed
+always on stilts: "It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my
+own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to
+me. Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech with
+such. You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of words; and
+the behavior is as awkward and proud."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with
+explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and
+agreeable influence stealing like a scent of a flower, or the sight of
+a new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied
+by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose
+thoughts I stimulate."
+
+Here Emerson did center in himself and never apologized. His gospel of
+self-reliance came natural to him. He was emphatically self, without a
+trace of selfishness. He went abroad to study himself more than other
+people--to note the effect of Europe on himself. He says, "I believe
+it's sound philosophy that wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the
+sole object we study and learn. Montaigne said himself was all he
+knew. Myself is much more than I know, and yet I know nothing else."
+In Paris he wrote to his brother William, "A lecture at the Sorbonne
+is far less useful to me than a lecture that I write myself"; and as
+for the literary society in Paris, though he thought longingly of it,
+yet he said, "Probably in years it would avail me nothing."
+
+The Journals are mainly a record of his thoughts and not of his days,
+except so far as the days brought him ideas. Here and there the
+personal element creeps in--some journey, some bit of experience, some
+visitor, or walks with Channing, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jones Very, and
+others; some lecturing experience, his class meetings, his travels
+abroad and chance meetings with distinguished men. But all the more
+purely personal element makes up but a small portion of the ten thick
+volumes of his Journal. Most readers, I fancy, will wish that the
+proportion of these things were greater. We all have thoughts and
+speculations of our own, but we can never hear too much about a man's
+real life.
+
+Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New
+England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He
+is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald,
+the poet-seer. He is the poet and prophet of the moral ideal. His main
+significance is religious, though nothing could be farther from him
+than creeds and doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical formalism.
+There is an atmosphere of sanctity about him that we do not feel about
+any other poet and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit of
+Oriental mysticism and bardic fervor grafted upon the shrewd,
+parsimonious, New England puritanic stock. The stress and wild,
+uncertain melody of his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. No
+writing surpasses his in the extent to which it takes hold of the
+concrete, the real, the familiar, and none surpasses his in its
+elusive, mystical suggestiveness, and its cryptic character. It is
+Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and Oriental devoutness,
+pantheism, and symbolism on the other. Its cheerful and sunny light of
+the common day enhances instead of obscures the light that falls from
+the highest heaven of the spirit. Saadi or Hafiz or Omar might have
+fathered him, but only a New England mother could have borne him.
+Probably more than half his poetry escapes the average reader; his
+longer poems, like "Initial, Dæmonic, and Celestial Love," "Monadnoc,"
+"Merlin," "The Sphinx," "The World-Soul," set the mind groping for the
+invisible rays of the spectrum of human thought and knowledge, but
+many of the shorter poems, such as "The Problem," "Each and All,"
+"Sea-Shore," "The Snow-Storm," "Musketaquid," "Days," "Song of
+Nature," "My Garden," "Boston Hymn," "Concord Hymn," and others, are
+among the most precious things in our literature.
+
+As Emerson was a bard among poets, a seer among philosophers, a
+prophet among essayists, an oracle among ethical teachers, so, as I
+have said, was he a solitary among men. He walked alone. He somewhere
+refers to his "porcupine impossibility of contact with men." His very
+thoughts are not social among themselves, they separate. Each stands
+alone; often they hardly have a bowing acquaintance; over and over
+their juxtaposition is mechanical and not vital. The redeeming feature
+is that they can afford to stand alone, like shafts of marble or
+granite.
+
+The force and worth of his page is not in its logical texture, but in
+the beauty and truth of its isolated sentences and paragraphs. There
+is little inductive or deductive reasoning in his books, but a series
+of affirmations whose premises and logical connection the reader does
+not always see.
+
+He records that his hearers found his lectures fine and poetical but a
+little puzzling. "One thought them as good as a kaleidoscope." The
+solid men of business said that they did not understand them but their
+daughters did.
+
+The lecture committee in Illinois in 1856 told him that the people
+wanted a hearty laugh. "The stout Illinoian," not finding the laugh,
+"after a short trial walks out of the hall." I think even his best
+Eastern audiences were always a good deal puzzled. The lecturer never
+tried to meet them halfway. He says himself of one of his lectures, "I
+found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good
+house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." The
+absence of the stairs in his house--of an easy entrance into the
+heart of the subject, and of a few consecutive and leading
+ideas--will, in a measure, account for the bewilderment of his
+hearers. When I heard Emerson in 1871 before audiences in Baltimore
+and Washington, I could see and feel this uncertainty and bewilderment
+in his auditors.
+
+His lectures could not be briefly summarized. They had no central
+thought. You could give a sample sentence, but not the one sentence
+that commanded all the others. Whatever he called it, his theme, as he
+himself confesses, was always fundamentally the same: "In all my
+lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the
+private man. This the people accept readily enough and even with loud
+commendations as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or
+Literature, or the Household, but the moment I call it Religion they
+are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which
+they receive everywhere else to a new class of facts."
+
+Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other points had been
+considered, was the religious test: Was he truly religious? Was his
+pole star the moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever with him?
+But few contemporary authors met his requirements in this respect.
+After his first visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge,
+Wordsworth, and others, he said they were all second-or third-rate men
+because of their want of the religious sense. They all looked
+backward to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a present
+revelation.
+
+His conception of the divine will as _the eternal tendency to the good
+of the whole, active in every atom, every moment_, is one of the
+thoughts in which religion and science meet and join hands.
+
+III
+
+In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their
+making--the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebulæ and
+star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion
+lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his
+printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of
+æsthetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising,
+I think, than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and
+show the 'prentice hand more.
+
+The themes around which his mind revolved all his life--nature, God,
+the soul--and their endless variations and implications, recur again
+and again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has
+new thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners,
+Experience, Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects
+every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new
+images. His mind had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were
+always near at hand with him. He could not get away from them. He
+renounced the pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less
+to him, but because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the
+feeling of the Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth
+under his feet.
+
+The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through
+his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his
+speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a
+_mélange_ they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from
+intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer
+neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary
+or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings
+after spiritual truths, and a hundred other things, are always marked
+by what he says that Macaulay did not possess--elevation of mind--and
+an abiding love for the real values in life and letters.
+
+Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled
+and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say
+nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as
+silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception
+of the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine
+humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."
+
+Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose. Here
+is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of
+thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows
+what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the
+mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no
+more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his reader
+will remember, begins in this wise:
+
+    "Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
+    Of thee from the hilltop looking down."
+
+In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says: "Nothing is beautiful
+alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole." In the poem above
+referred to this becomes:
+
+    "All are needed by each one;
+    Nothing is fair or good alone."
+
+In 1856 we find the first stanza of his 'beautiful "Two Rivers,"
+written in prose form: "Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the
+music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee as
+those through Concord plain." The substance of the next four stanzas
+is in prose form also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I
+love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air,
+and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the
+inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in
+summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who
+can hear it"; and so on. In the poem these sentences become:
+
+    "Thou in thy narrow banks are pent:
+    The stream I love unbounded goes
+    Through flood and sea and firmament;
+    Through light, through life, it forward flows.
+
+    "I see the inundation sweet,
+    I hear the spending of the stream
+    Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
+    Through love and thought, through power and dream."
+
+It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic of his own work. He
+knew when he had struck fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was
+as exacting with himself as with others. His conception of the
+character and function of the poet was so high that he found the
+greatest poets wanting. The poet is one of his three or four
+ever-recurring themes. He is the divine man. He is bard and prophet,
+seer and savior. He is the acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of
+insight into the method of nature, and devoid of religious emotion,
+was to him but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe
+"the jingle man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The
+intellectual content of Poe's works _was_ negligible. He was a wizard
+with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our
+knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in
+life, he did not contribute to our contentment in the world--the
+bread of life was not in him. What was in him was mastery over the
+architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in Shelley for the same
+reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the
+term,--the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought
+empty,--was his final test of any man. Unless there was something
+fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep
+of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of
+the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson
+demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his
+time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New England. It
+was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested
+Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it
+"the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to
+American literature."
+
+Emerson said of himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in
+the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have
+written." We must set this statement down to one of those fits of
+dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods that often came
+upon him. What he meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier
+age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and
+grandfather, but coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and
+Wordsworth, and other liberating influences of the nineteenth century,
+he was bound to be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of
+his immoderate fondness for writing. Writing was the passion of his
+life, his supreme joy, and he went through the world with the writer's
+eye and ear and hand always on duty. And his contribution to the
+literature of man's higher moral and æsthetic nature is one of the
+most valuable of the age in which he lived.
+
+IV
+
+Apart from the account of his travels and other personal experiences,
+the Journals are mainly made up of discussions of upwards of fifty
+subjects of general and fundamental interest, ranging from art to war,
+and looked at from many and diverse points of view. Of these subjects
+three are dominant, recurring again and again in each volume. These
+are nature, literature, and religion. Emerson's main interests
+centered in these themes. Using these terms in their broadest sense,
+this is true, I think, of all his published books. Emerson was an
+idealist, first, last, and all the time, and he was a literary artist,
+or aimed to be, first, last, and all the time, and in the same measure
+and to the same extent was he a devout religious soul, using the term
+religion as he sometimes uses it, as a feeling of the Infinite.
+
+There are one hundred and seventy-six paragraphs, long and short,
+given to literature and art, and one hundred and sixty given to
+religious subjects, and over thirty given to nature. It is interesting
+to note that he devotes more paragraphs to woman than to man; and more
+to society than to solitude, though only to express his dislike of the
+former and his love for the latter. There are more thoughts about
+science than about metaphysics, more about war than about love, more
+about poetry than about philosophy, more on beauty than on knowledge,
+more on walking than on books. There are three times as many
+paragraphs on nature (thirty-three) as on the Bible, all of which is
+significant of his attitude of mind.
+
+Emerson was a preacher without a creed, a scholar devoted to
+super-literary ends, an essayist occupied with thoughts of God, the
+soul, nature, the moral law--always the literary artist looking for
+the right word, the right image, but always bending his art to the
+service of religious thought. He was one of the most religious souls
+of his country and time, or of any country and time, yet was disowned
+by all the sects and churches of his time. He made religion too
+pervasive, and too inclusive to suit them; the stream at once got out
+of its banks and inundated all their old landmarks. In the last
+analysis of his thought, his ultimate theme was God, and yet he never
+allowed himself to attempt any definite statement about God--refusing
+always to discuss God in terms of human personality. When Emerson
+wrote "Representative Men" he felt that Jesus was the Representative
+Man whom he ought to sketch, "but the task required great
+gifts--steadiest insight and perfect temper; else the consciousness of
+want of sympathy in the audience would make one petulant and sore in
+spite of himself."
+
+There are few great men in history or philosophy or literature or
+poetry or divinity whose names do not appear more or less frequently
+in the Journals. For instance, in the Journal of 1864 the names or
+works of one hundred and seventeen men appear, ranging from Zeno to
+Jones Very. And this is a fair average. Of course the names of his
+friends and contemporaries appear the most frequently. The name that
+recurs the most often is that of his friend and neighbor Thoreau.
+There are ninety-seven paragraphs in which the Hermit of Walden is the
+main or the secondary figure. He discusses him and criticizes him, and
+quotes from him, always showing an abiding interest in, and affection
+for, him. Thoreau was in so many ways so characteristically Emersonian
+that one wonders what influence it was in the place or time that gave
+them both, with their disparity of ages, so nearly the same stamp.
+Emerson is by far the more imposing figure, the broader, the wiser,
+the more tolerant, the more representative; he stood four-square to
+the world in a sense that Thoreau did not. Thoreau presented a pretty
+thin edge to the world. If he stood broadside to anything, it was to
+nature. He was undoubtedly deeply and permanently influenced by
+Emerson both in his mental habits and in his manner of life, yet the
+main part of him was original and unadulterated Thoreau. His literary
+style is in many respects better than that of Emerson; its logical
+texture is better; it has more continuity, more evolution, it is more
+flexible and adaptive; it is the medium of a lesser mind, but of a
+mind more thoroughly imbued with the influence of the classical
+standards of modern literature. I believe "Walden" will last as long
+as anything Emerson has written, if not longer. It is the fruit of a
+sweeter solitude and detachment from the world than Emerson ever knew,
+a private view of nature, and has a fireside and campside quality that
+essays fashioned for the lecture platform do not have. Emerson's pages
+are more like mosaics, richly inlaid with gems of thought and poetry
+and philosophy, while Thoreau's are more like a closely woven,
+many-colored textile.
+
+Thoreau's "Maine Woods" I look upon as one of the best books of the
+kind in English literature. It has just the right tone and quality,
+like Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast"--a tone and quality that
+sometimes come to a man when he makes less effort to write than to
+see and feel truly. He does not aim to exploit the woods, but to live
+with them and possess himself of their spirit. The Cape Cod book also
+has a similar merit; it almost leaves a taste of the salt sea spray
+upon your lips. Emerson criticizes Thoreau freely, and justly, I
+think. As a person he lacked sweetness and winsomeness; as a writer he
+was at times given to a meaningless exaggeration.
+
+     Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of
+     unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon
+     learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word
+     and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild
+     mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow
+     and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for
+     their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and
+     Paris. With the constant inclination to dispraise cities and
+     civilization, he yet can find no way to know woods and
+     woodmen except by paralleling them with towns and townsmen.
+     Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it makes me
+     nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.
+
+     I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, but he
+     does not disclose new matter. I am very familiar with all
+     his thoughts,--they are my own quite originally drest. But
+     if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into
+     circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was
+     created to say. I said to him what I often feel, I only know
+     three persons who seem to me fully to see this law of
+     reciprocity or compensation--himself, Alcott, and myself:
+     and 't is odd that we should all be neighbors, for in the
+     wide land or the wide earth I do not know another who seems
+     to have it as deeply and originally as these three
+     Gothamites.
+
+A remark of Emerson's upon Thoreau calls up the image of John Muir to
+me: "If I knew only Thoreau, I should think coöperation of good men
+impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth,
+for comfort, and joy?" Then, after crediting Thoreau with some
+admirable gifts,--centrality, penetration, strong understanding,--he
+proceeds to say, "all his resources of wit and invention are lost to
+me, in every experiment, year after year, that I make to hold
+intercourse with his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight
+you with, and the time and temper wasted."
+
+Emerson met John Muir in the Yosemite in 1871 and was evidently
+impressed with him. Somewhere he gives a list of his men which begins
+with Carlyle and ends with Muir. Here was another man with more
+character than intellect, as Emerson said of Carlyle, and with the
+flavor of the wild about him. Muir was not too compliant and
+deferential. He belonged to the sayers of No. Contradiction was the
+breath of his nostrils. He had the Scottish chariness of bestowing
+praise or approval, and could surely give Emerson the sense of being
+_met_ which he demanded. Writing was irksome to Muir as it was to
+Carlyle, but in monologue, in an attentive company, he shone; not a
+great thinker, but a mind strongly characteristic. His philosophy
+rarely rose above that of the Sunday school, but his moral fiber was
+very strong, and his wit ready and keen. In conversation and in daily
+intercourse he was a man not easily put aside. Emerson found him
+deeply read in nature lore and with some suggestion about his look and
+manner of the wild and rugged solitude in which he lived so much.
+
+Emerson was alive to everything around him; every object touched some
+spring in his mind; the church spire, the shadows on the windows at
+night, the little girl with her pail of whortleberries, the passing
+bee, bird, butterfly, the clouds, the streams, the trees--all found
+his mind open to any suggestion they might make. He is intent on the
+now and the here. He listens to every newcomer with an expectant air.
+He is full of the present. I once saw him at West Point during the
+June examinations. How alert and eager he was! The bored and
+perfunctory air of his fellow members on the Board of Visitors
+contrasted sharply with his active, expectant interest.
+
+V
+
+He lived absolutely in his own day and generation, and no contemporary
+writer of real worth escaped his notice. He is never lavish in his
+praise, but is for the most part just and discriminating. Walt
+Whitman is mentioned only thrice in the Journals, Lowell only twice,
+Longfellow once or twice, Matthew Arnold three times, but Jones Very
+is quoted and discussed sixteen times. Very was a poet who had no fast
+colors; he has quite faded out in our day.
+
+Of Matthew Arnold Emerson says: "I should like to call attention to
+the critical superiority of Arnold, his excellent ear for style, and
+the singular poverty of his poetry, that in fact he has written but
+one poem, 'Thyrsis,' and that on an inspiration borrowed from Milton."
+Few good readers, I think, will agree with Emerson about the poverty
+of Arnold's poetry. His "Dover Beach" is one of the first-rate poems
+in English literature. Emerson has words of praise for Lowell--thinks
+the production of such a man "a certificate of good elements in the
+soil, climate, and institutions of America," but in 1868 he declares
+that his new poems show an advance "in talent rather than in poetic
+tone"; that the advance "rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than
+the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a
+new poem, and which is unanalysable, and makes the merit of an ode of
+Collins, or Gray, or Wordsworth, or Herbert, or Byron." He evidently
+thought little of Lowell's severe arraignment of him in a college poem
+which he wrote soon after the delivery of the famous "Divinity School
+Address." The current of religious feeling in Cambridge set so
+strongly against Emerson for several years that Lowell doubtless
+merely reflected it. Why did he not try to deflect it, or to check it?
+And yet, when Emerson's friends did try to defend him, it was against
+his will. He hated to be defended in a newspaper: "As long as all that
+is said is against me I feel a certain austere assurance of success,
+but as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one
+that lies unprotected before his enemies."
+
+Next to Thoreau, Emerson devotes to Alcott more space in his Journals
+than to any other man. It is all telling interpretation, description,
+and criticism. Truly, Alcott must have had some extraordinary power to
+have made such a lasting impression upon Emerson. When my friend Myron
+Benton and I first met Emerson in 1863 at West Point, Emerson spoke of
+Alcott very pointedly, and said we should never miss a chance to hear
+his conversation, but that when he put pen to paper all his
+inspiration left him. His thoughts faded as soon as he tried to set
+them down. There must have been some curious illusion about it all on
+the part of Emerson, as no fragment of Alcott's wonderful talk worth
+preserving has come down to us. The waters of the sea are blue, but
+not in the pailful. There must have been something analogous in
+Alcott's conversations, some total effect which the details do not
+justify, or something in the atmosphere which he created, that gave
+certain of his hearers the conviction that they were voyaging with him
+through the celestial depths.
+
+It was a curious fact that Alcott "could not recall one word or part
+of his own conversation, or of any one's, let the expression be never
+so happy." And he seems to have hypnotized Emerson in the same way.
+"He made here some majestic utterances, but so inspired me that even I
+forgot the words often." "Olympian dreams," Emerson calls his
+talk--moonshine, it appears at this distance.
+
+"His discourse soars to a wonderful height," says Emerson, "so
+regular, so lucid, so playful, so new and disdainful of all boundaries
+of tradition and experience, that the hearers seem no longer to have
+bodies or material gravity, but almost they can mount into the air at
+pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system. I say
+this of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he
+loses, in my judgment, all his power, and I derive more pain than
+pleasure from the perusal." Some illusion surely that made the effort
+to report him like an attempt to capture the rainbow, only to find it
+common water.
+
+In 1842 Emerson devotes eight pages in his Journal to an analysis of
+Alcott, and very masterly they are. He ends with these sentences:
+"This noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more
+such persons to exist."
+
+"When Alcott wrote from England that he was bringing home Wright and
+Lane, I wrote him a letter which I required him to show them, saying
+that they might safely trust his theories, but that they should put no
+trust whatever in his statement of facts. When they all arrived
+here--he and his victims--I asked them if he showed them the letter;
+they answered that he did; so I was clear."
+
+Another neighbor who greatly impressed Emerson, and of whom he has
+much to say, was Father Taylor, the sailor preacher of Boston. There
+is nothing better in the Journals than the pages devoted to
+description and analysis of this remarkable man. To Emerson he
+suggested the wealth of Nature. He calls him a "godly poet, the
+Shakespear of the sailor and the poor." "I delight in his great
+personality, the way and sweep of the man which, like a frigate's way,
+takes up for the time the centre of the ocean, paves it with a white
+street, and all the lesser craft 'do curtsey to him, do him
+reverence.'" A man all emotion, all love, all inspiration, but, like
+Alcott, impossible to justify your high estimate of by any quotation.
+His power was all personal living power, and could not be transferred
+to print. The livid embers of his discourse became dead charcoal when
+reported by another, or, as Emerson more happily puts it, "A creature
+of instinct, his colors are all opaline and dove's-neck-lustre and can
+only be seen at a distance. Examine them, and they disappear." More
+exactly they are visible only at a certain angle. Of course this is in
+a measure true of all great oratory--it is not so much the words as
+the man.
+
+Speaking of Father Taylor in connection with Alcott, Emerson says that
+one was the fool of his ideas, and the other of his fancy.
+
+An intellectual child of Emerson's was Ellery Channing, but he seems
+to have inherited in an exaggerated form only the faults of his
+father. Channing appears to have been a crotchety, disgruntled person,
+always aiming at walking on his head instead of on his heels. Emerson
+quotes many of his sayings, not one of them worth preserving, all
+marked by a kind of violence and disjointedness. They had many walks
+together.
+
+Emerson was so fond of paradoxes and extreme statements that both
+Channing and Thoreau seem to have vied with each other in uttering
+hard or capricious sayings when in his presence. Emerson catches at a
+vivid and picturesque statement, if it has even a fraction of truth in
+it, like a fly-catcher at a fly.
+
+A fair sample of Channing's philosophy is the following: "He persists
+in his bad opinion of orchards and farming, declares that the only
+success he ever had with a farmer was that he once paid a cent for a
+russet apple; and farming, he thinks, is an attempt to outwit God with
+a hoe; that they plant a great many potatoes with much ado, but it is
+doubtful if they ever get the seed back." Channing seems to have
+dropped such pearls of wisdom as that all along the road in their
+walks! Another sample of Channing's philosophy which Emerson thinks
+worthy of quoting. They were walking over the fields in November.
+Channing complained of the poverty of invention on the part of Nature:
+"'Why, they had frozen water last year; why should they do it again?
+Therefore it was so easy to be an artist, because _they_ do the same
+thing always,' and therefore he only wants time to make him perfect in
+the imitation."
+
+VI
+
+Emerson was occupied entirely with the future, as Carlyle was occupied
+entirely with the past. Emerson shared the open expectation of the new
+world, Carlyle struggled under the gloom and pessimism of the old--a
+greater character, but a far less lambent and helpful spirit. Emerson
+seems to have been obsessed with the idea that a new and greater man
+was to appear. He looked into the face of every newcomer with an
+earnest, expectant air, as if he might prove to be the new man: this
+thought inspires the last stanzas of his "Song of Nature":
+
+    "Let war and trade and creeds and song
+    Blend, ripen race on race,
+    The sunburnt world a man shall breed
+    Of all the zones and countless days.
+
+    "No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
+    My oldest force is good as new,
+    And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
+    Gives back the bending heavens in dew."
+
+Emerson was under no illusion as to the effect of distance. He knew
+the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed
+and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of
+distance--an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The
+everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the
+alchemy of time and space to work in. It has been said that all
+martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering. Holy ground is not holy when
+we walk upon it. The now and the here seem cheap and commonplace.
+Emerson knew that "a score of airy miles will smooth rough Monadnoc to
+a gem," but he knew also that it would not change the character of
+Monadnoc. He knew that the past and the present, the near and the far,
+were made of one stuff. He united the courage of science with the
+sensibility of poetry. He would not be defrauded of the value of the
+present hour, or of the thoughts which he and other men think, or of
+the lives which they live to-day. "I will tell you how you can enrich
+me--if you will recommend to-day to me." His doctrine of
+self-reliance, which he preached in season and out of season, was
+based upon the conviction that Nature and the soul do not become old
+and outworn, that the great characters and great thoughts of the past
+were the achievements of men who trusted themselves before custom or
+law. The sun shines to-day; the constellations hang there in the
+heavens the same as of old. God is as near us as ever He was--why
+should we take our revelations at second hand? No other writer who has
+used the English language has ever preached such a heroic doctrine of
+self-trust, or set the present moment so high in the circle of the
+years, in the diadem of the days.
+
+It is an old charge against Emerson that he was deficient in human
+sympathy. He makes it against himself; the ties of association which
+most persons find so binding seemed to hold him very lightly. There
+was always a previous question with him--the moral value of one's
+associations. Unless you sicken and die to some purpose, why such an
+ado about it? Unless the old ruin of a house harbored great men and
+great women, or was the scene of heroic deeds, why linger around it?
+The purely human did not appeal to him; history interested him only as
+it threw light upon to-day. History is a record of the universal mind;
+hence of your mind, of my mind--"all the facts of history preëxist in
+the mind as laws." "What Plato thought, every man may think. What a
+saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he
+can understand." "All that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of
+a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself"; and so
+on, seeing in history only biography, and interested in the past only
+as he can link it with the present. Always an intellectual interest,
+never a human or an emotional one. His Journal does not reveal him
+going back to the old places, or lingering fondly over the memories of
+his youth. He speaks of his "unpleasing boyhood," of his unhappy
+recollections, etc., not because of unkindness or hardships
+experienced, but because of certain shortcomings or deficiencies of
+character and purpose, of which he is conscious--"some meanness," or
+"unfounded pride" which may lower him in the opinion of others. Pride,
+surely, but not ignoble pride.
+
+Emerson's expectation of the great poet, the great man, is voiced in
+his "Representative Men": "If the companions of our childhood should
+turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not
+surprise us." On the contrary, I think it would surprise most of us
+very much. It is from the remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great
+things. We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. But with Emerson
+the contrary seems to have been the case. He met the new person or
+took up the new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition of
+mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue
+bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His
+optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his
+literary firmament have quite faded out--all of them, I think, but
+Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the
+coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to "Leaves
+of Grass"--a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had
+got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he
+had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him
+in Washington in 1871 or '72, he said he wished Whitman's friends
+would "quarrel" with him more about his poems, as some years earlier
+he himself had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman walked for
+hours on Boston Common, he remonstrating with Whitman about certain
+passages in "Leaves of Grass" which he tried in vain to persuade him
+to omit in the next edition. Whitman would persist in being Whitman.
+Now, counseling such a course to a man in an essay on "Self-Reliance"
+is quite a different thing from entirely approving of it in a concrete
+example.
+
+In 1840 Emerson writes: "A notice of modern literature ought to
+include (ought it not?) a notice of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor,
+of Bettina, of Sampson Reed." The first three names surely, but who
+is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in
+such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a
+Swedenborgian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, from which
+Emerson quotes, and to which he often alludes, a book that has long
+been forgotten; and is not Bettina forgotten also?
+
+Emerson found more in Jones Very than has any one else; the poems of
+Very that he included in "Parnassus" have little worth. A
+comparatively unknown and now forgotten English writer also moved
+Emerson unduly. Listen to this: "In England, Landor, De Quincey,
+Carlyle, three men of original literary genius; but the scholar, the
+catholic, cosmic intellect, Bacon's own son, the Lord Chief Justice on
+the Muse's Bench is"--who do you think, in 1847?--"Wilkinson"! Garth
+Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson says of him in
+"English Traits": "There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic
+roll, not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought
+to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality." To bid a man's stock
+up like that may not, in the long run, be good for the man, but it
+shows what a generous, optimistic critic Emerson was.
+
+VII
+
+In his published works Emerson is chary of the personal element; he
+says: "We can hardly speak of our own experiences and the names of
+our friends sparingly enough." In his books he would be only an
+impersonal voice; the man Emerson, as such, he hesitated to intrude.
+But in the Journals we get much more of the personal element, as would
+be expected. We get welcome glimpses of the man, of his moods, of his
+diversions, of his home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see him
+as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a member of a rural
+community. We see him in his walks and talks with friends and
+neighbors--with Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, and
+others--and get snatches of the conversations. We see the growth of
+his mind, his gradual emancipation from the bondage of the orthodox
+traditions.
+
+Very welcome is the growth of Emerson's appreciation of Wordsworth. As
+a divinity student he was severe in his criticism of Wordsworth, but
+as his own genius unfolded more and more he saw the greatness of
+Wordsworth, till in middle life he pronounced his famous Ode the
+high-water mark of English literature. Yet after that his fondness for
+a telling, picturesque figure allows him to inquire if Wordsworth is
+not like a bell with a wooden tongue. All this is an admirable
+illustration of his familiar dictum: "Speak what you think now in hard
+words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,
+though it contradict everything you say to-day."
+
+In the Journals we see Emerson going up and down the country in his
+walks, on his lecture tours in the West, among his neighbors, wherever
+and whenever he goes as alert and watchful as a sportsman. He was a
+sportsman of a new kind; his game was ideas. He was always looking for
+hints and images to aid him in his writings. He was like a bird
+perpetually building a nest; every moment he wanted new material, and
+everything that diverted him from his quest was an unwelcome
+interruption. He had no great argument to build, no system of
+philosophy to organize and formulate, no plot, like a novelist, to
+work out, no controversy on hand--he wanted pertinent, concrete, and
+striking facts and incidents to weave in his essay on Fate, or
+Circles, or Character, or Farming, or Worship, or Wealth--something
+that his intuitive and disjointed habit of thought could seize upon
+and make instant use of.
+
+We see him walking in free converse with his friends and neighbors,
+receiving them in his own house, friendly and expectant, but always
+standing aloof, never giving himself heartily to them, exchanging
+ideas with them across a gulf, prizing their wit and their wisdom, but
+cold and reserved toward them personally, destitute of all feeling of
+comradeship, an eye, an ear, a voice, an intellect, but rarely, or in
+a minor degree, a heart, or a feeling of fellowship--a giving and a
+taking quite above and beyond the reach of articulate speech. When
+they had had their say, he was done with them. When you have found a
+man's limitations, he says, it is all up with him. After your friend
+has fired his shot, good-by. The pearl in the oyster is what is
+wanted, and not the oyster. "If I love you, what is that to you?" is a
+saying that could have been coined only in Concord. It seems to me
+that the basis of all wholesome human attachment is character, not
+intellect. Admiration and love are quite different things.
+Transcendental friendships seem to be cold, bloodless affairs.
+
+One feels as if he wanted to squeeze or shake Emerson to see if he
+cannot get some normal human love out of him, a love that looks for
+nothing beyond love, a love which is its own excuse for being, a love
+that is not a bargain--simple, common, disinterested human love. But
+Emerson said, "I like man but not men."
+
+"You would have me love you," he writes in his Journal. "What shall I
+love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought
+and said? Well, whilst you were thinking and saying them, but not now.
+I see no possibility of loving anything but what now is, and is
+becoming; your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your
+opening thought, your prayer, I can love--but what else?"
+
+Can you not love your friend for himself alone, for his kinship with
+you, without taking an inventory of his moral and intellectual
+qualities; for something in him that makes you happy in his presence?
+The personal attraction which Whitman felt between himself and certain
+types of men, and which is the basis of most manly friendships,
+Emerson probably never felt. One cannot conceive of him as caring
+deeply for any person who could not teach him something. He says, "I
+speculate on virtue, not burn with love." Again, "A rush of thoughts
+is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to me." Pure
+intellectual values seem alone to have counted with Emerson and his
+followers. With men his question was, "What can you teach me?" With
+Nature, "What new image or suggestion have you got for me to-day?"
+With science, "What ethical value do your facts hold?" With natural
+history, "Can I translate your facts and laws into my supernatural
+history?" With civil history, "Will your record help me to understand
+my own day and land?" The quintessence of things was what he always
+sought.
+
+"We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves," Emerson wrote in
+1842, and then added, "We lose time in trying to be like others." One
+is reminded of passages in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, wherein
+each tried to persuade the other to be like himself. Carlyle would
+have Emerson "become concrete and write in prose the straightest
+way," would have him come down from his "perilous altitude,"
+"soliloquizing on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude,
+where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness
+and only _the man_ and the stars and the earth are visible--come down
+into your own poor Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its
+blind, or half-blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its
+tears, and try to evolve in some measure the hidden God-like that lies
+in it." "I wish you would take an American hero, one whom you really
+love, and give us a History of him--make an artistic bronze statue (in
+good words) of his Life and him!" Emerson's reply in effect is,
+Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes--give me "the culled
+results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis_,
+a few sentences, hints of the final moral you draw from so much
+penetrating inquest into past and present men."
+
+In reply to Carlyle's criticism of the remote and abstract character
+of his work, Emerson says, "What you say now and heretofore respecting
+the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I
+hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not
+know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal
+right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it
+of the last act of Congress."
+
+VIII
+
+Emerson's love of nature was one of his ruling passions. It took him
+to the country to live, it led him to purchase Walden Pond and the
+Walden woods; it led him forth upon his almost daily walks, winter and
+summer, to the fields and the woods. His was the love of the poet and
+the idealist, of the man who communes with Nature, and finds a moral
+and an intellectual tonic in her works. The major part of his poetry
+is inspired by Nature. He complains of Tennyson's poetry that it has
+few or no wood notes. His first book, "Nature," is steeped in
+religious and poetic emotion. He said in his Journal in 1841: "All my
+thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath
+of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. Shall I not then
+call my little book Forest Essays?" He finally called it "Nature." He
+loves the "hermit birds that harbor in the woods. I can do well for
+weeks with no other society than the partridge and the jay, my daily
+company."
+
+"I have known myself entertained by a single dew-drop, or an icicle,
+by a liatris, or a fungus, and seen God revealed in the shadow of a
+leaf." He says that going to Nature is more than a medicine, it is
+health. "As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel, that
+nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me
+my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing
+on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted
+into the infinite space, I became happy in my universal relations."
+This sentiment of his also recalls his lines:
+
+    "A woodland walk,
+    A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
+    A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
+    Salve my worst wounds."
+
+     If life were long enough, among my thousand and one works
+     should be a book of Nature whereof Howitt's _Seasons_ should
+     not be so much the model as the parody. It should contain
+     the natural history of the woods around my shifting camp for
+     every month in the year. It should tie their astronomy,
+     botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry
+     together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on
+     his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins,
+     bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds
+     of the birch and the oak; in every one of the last is a
+     star. The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river
+     flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this composite,
+     collective beauty which refuses to be analysed. Nothing is
+     beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole.
+     Learn the history of a craneberry. Mark the day when the
+     pine cones and acorns fall.
+
+     I go out daily and nightly to feed my eyes on the horizon
+     and the sky, and come to feel the want of this scope as I do
+     of water for my washing.
+
+     What learned I this morning in the woods, the oracular
+     woods? Wise are they, the ancient nymphs; pleasing, sober,
+     melancholy truth say those untameable savages, the pines.
+
+He frequently went to Walden Pond of an afternoon and read Goethe or
+some other great author.
+
+There was an element of mysticism in Emerson's love of nature as there
+is in that of all true nature-lovers. None knew better than he that
+nature is not all birds and flowers. His love of nature was that of
+the poet and artist, and not that of the scientist or naturalist.
+
+"I tell you I love the peeping of the Hyla in a pond in April, or the
+evening cry of the whippoorwill, better than all the bellowing of all
+the Bulls of Bashan, or all the turtles of all Palestine."
+
+Any personal details about his life which Emerson gives us are always
+welcome. We learn that his different winter courses of lectures in
+Boston, usually ten of them, were attended on an average by about five
+hundred persons, and netted him about five hundred dollars.
+
+When he published a new volume, he was very liberal with presentation
+copies. Of his first volume of poems, published in 1846, he sent
+eighty copies to his friends. When "May-Day" was published in 1867, he
+sent fifty copies to friends; one of them went to Walt Whitman. I saw
+it the day it came. It was in a white dress (silk, I think); very
+beautiful. He sent a copy of his first volume of "Nature" to Landor.
+One would like to know what Landor said in reply. The copy he sent to
+Carlyle I saw in the Scot's library, in Cheyne Row, in 1871.
+
+IX
+
+Emerson was so drawn to the racy and original that it seems as if
+original sin had a certain fascination for him. The austere, the
+Puritanical Emerson, the heir of eight generations of clergy-men, the
+man who did not like to have Frederika Bremer play the piano in his
+house on Sunday, seems at times to covet the "swear-words" of the
+common people. They itch at his ears, they have flavor and reality. He
+sometimes records them in his Journal; for example, this remark of the
+Canadian wood-chopper who cut wood for his neighbor--he preferred to
+work by the job rather than by the day--the days were "so damned
+long!"
+
+The mob, Emerson says, is always interesting: "A blacksmith, a
+truckman, a farmer, we follow into the bar-room and watch with
+eagerness what they shall say." "Cannot the stinging dialect of the
+sailor be domesticated?" "My page about Consistency would be better
+written, 'Damn Consistency.'" But try to fancy Emerson swearing like
+the men on the street! Once only he swore a sacred oath, and that he
+himself records: it was called out by the famous, and infamous,
+Fugitive Slave Law which made every Northern man hound and huntsman
+for the Southern slave-driver. "This filthy enactment," he says, "was
+made in the Nineteenth Century by men who could read and write. I will
+not obey it, by God!"
+
+Evidently the best thing the laboring people had to offer Emerson was
+their racy and characteristic speech. When one of his former neighbors
+said of an eclipse of the sun that it looked as if a "nigger" was
+poking his head into the sun, Emerson recorded it in his Journal. His
+son reports that Emerson enjoyed the talk of the stable-men and used
+to tell their anecdotes and boasts of their horses when he came home;
+for example, "In the stable you'd take him for a slouch, but lead him
+to the door, and when he lifts up his eyes, and looks abroad,--by
+thunder! you'd think the sky was all horse." Such surprises and
+exaggerations always attracted him, unless they took a turn that made
+him laugh. He loved wit with the laugh taken out of it. The genial
+smile and not uproarious laughter suited his mood best.
+
+He was a lover of quiet, twinkling humor. Such humor gleams out often
+in his Journal. It gleams in this passage about Dr. Ripley: "Dr.
+Ripley prays for rain with great explicitness on Sunday, and on Monday
+the showers fell. When I spoke of the speed with which his prayers
+were answered, the good man looked modest." There is another
+prayer-for-rain story that he enjoys telling: "Dr. Allyne, of Duxbury,
+prayed for rain, at church. In the afternoon the boys carried
+umbrellas. 'Why?' 'Because you prayed for rain.' 'Pooh! boys! we
+always pray for rain: it's customary.'"
+
+At West Point he asked a lieutenant if they had morning prayers at
+college. "We have _reveillé_ beat, which is the same thing."
+
+He tells with relish the story of a German who went to hire a horse
+and chaise at a stable in Cambridge. "Shall I put in a buffalo?"
+inquired the livery-man. "My God! no," cried the astonished German,
+"put in a horse."
+
+Emerson, I am sure, takes pleasure in relating a characteristic story
+of Dr. Ripley and a thunder-shower: "One August afternoon, when I was
+in the hayfield helping him with his man to rake up his hay, I well
+remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky when the
+thunder gust was coming up to spoil the hay. He raked very fast, then
+looked at the clouds and said, 'We are in the Lord's hands, mind your
+rake, George! we are in the Lord's hands,' and seemed to say, 'You
+know me, the field is mine--Dr. Ripley's--thine own servant.'"
+
+The stories Emerson delighted in were all rich in this quiet humor. I
+heard of one he used to tell about a man who, when he went to his club
+at night, often lingered too long over his cups, and came home
+befuddled in the small hours, and was frequently hauled over the coals
+by his wife. One night he again came home late, and was greeted with
+the usual upbraiding in the morning. "It was not late," he said, "it
+was only one o'clock." "It was much later than that," said the wife.
+"It was one o'clock," repeated the man; "I heard it strike one three
+or four times!"
+
+Another good Emersonian story, though I do not know that he ever heard
+it, is that of an old woman who had a farm in Indiana near the
+Michigan line. The line was resurveyed, and the authorities set her
+farm in Michigan. The old lady protested--she said it was all she
+could do to stand the winters of Indiana, she could never stand those
+of Michigan!
+
+Cannot one see a twinkle in Emerson's eye when he quotes his wife as
+saying that "it is wicked to go to church on Sunday"? Emerson's son
+records that his father hated to be made to laugh, as he could not
+command his face well. Hence he evidently notes with approval another
+remark of his wife's: "A human being should beware how he laughs, for
+then he shows all his faults." What he thought of the loud, surprising
+laugh with which Carlyle often ended his bitter sentences, I do not
+know that he records. Its meaning to Carlyle was evidently, "Oh! what
+does it all matter?" If Emerson himself did not smile when he wrote
+the sentence about "a maiden so pure that she exchanged glances only
+with the stars," his reader, I am sure, will.
+
+Emerson evidently enjoyed such a story as this which was told him by a
+bishop: There was a dispute in a vestry at Providence between two hot
+church-members. One said at last, "I should like to know who you
+are"--
+
+"Who I am?" cried the other,--"who I am! I am a humble Christian, you
+damned old heathen, you!"
+
+The minister whom he heard say that "nobody enjoyed religion less than
+ministers, as none enjoyed food so little as cooks," must have
+provoked the broadest kind of a smile.
+
+Although one of Emerson's central themes in his Journals was his
+thought about God, or his feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded
+in formulating his ideas on the subject and could not say what God is
+or is not. At the age of twenty-one he wrote in his Journal, "I know
+that I _know_ next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very promising
+frame of mind for a young man. "It is not certain that God exists, but
+that He does not is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera."
+
+A little later he wrote: "The government of God is not a plan--that
+would be Destiny, [or we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore."
+
+He quotes this from Plotinus: "Of the Unity of God, nothing can be
+predicated, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it is above all
+these."
+
+It was a bold saying of his that "God builds his temple in the heart
+on the ruins of churches and religion."
+
+"A great deal of God in the universe," he says, "but not available to
+us until we can make it up into a man."
+
+But if asked, what makes it up into a man? why does it take this form?
+he would have been hard put to it for an answer.
+
+Persons who assume to know all about God, as if He lived just around
+the corner, as Matthew Arnold said, will not find much comfort in
+Emerson's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate expression
+concerning Him. How can we put the All, the Eternal, in words? How can
+we define the Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds are cast
+in the mould of the finite; our language is fashioned from our
+dealings with a world of boundaries and limitations and concrete
+objects and forces. How much can it serve us in dealing with a world
+of opposite kind--with the Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent,
+and Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines in a bottomless
+sea? How are we to apply our conceptions of personality to the
+all-life, to that which transcends all limitations, to that which is
+everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a local habitation and a
+name to the universal energy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or
+candle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence of the Infinite
+Light. We can deal with the solid bodies on the surface of the earth,
+but the earth as a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms of
+over and under, up and down, east and west, and the like, fail us. You
+may go westward around the world and return to your own door coming
+from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradiction, the sphere a
+surface without boundaries, a mass without weight. When we ascribe
+weight to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of bodies on
+its surface--the pull of the earth is the measure of their weight; but
+the earth itself--what pulls that? Only some larger body can pull
+that, and the adjustment of the system is such that the centripetal
+and centrifugal forces balance each other, and the globes float as
+lightly as any feather.
+
+Emerson said he denied personality to God because it is too little,
+not too much. If you ascribe personality to God, it is perfectly fair
+to pester you with questions about Him. Where is He? How long has He
+been there? What does He do? Personality without place, or form, or
+substance, or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are the
+victims of words. We get a name for a thing and then invent the thing
+that fits it. All our names for the human faculties, as the will, the
+reason, the understanding, the imagination, conscience, instincts, and
+so on, are arbitrary divisions of a whole, to suit our own
+convenience, like the days of the week, or the seasons of the year.
+Out of unity we make diversity for purposes of our practical needs.
+Thought tends to the one, action to the many. We must have small
+change for everything in the universe, because our lives are made up
+of small things. We must break wholes up into fractions, and then seek
+their common multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We deal with
+God by limiting Him and breaking Him up into his attributes, or by
+conceiving Him under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less
+baffling to us. We can handle Him the better. We make a huge man of
+Him and then try to dodge the consequences of our own limitations.
+
+All these baffling questions pressed hard upon Emerson. He could not
+do without God in nature, and yet, like most of us, he could not
+justify himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part of nature.
+God is the All, but the All is a hard mass to digest. It means hell as
+well as heaven, demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology,
+devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well as earth
+tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer breezes, the jungle as well
+as the household, pain as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How
+are you to reconcile all these contradictions?
+
+Emerson said that nature was a swamp with flowers and birds on the
+borders, and terrible things in the interior. Shall we have one God
+for the fair things, and another God for the terrible things?
+
+"Nature is saturated with deity," he says, the terrific things as the
+beatific, I suppose. "A great deal of God in the universe," he again
+says, "but not valuable to us till we can make it up into a man." And
+when we make it up into a man we have got a true compendium of nature;
+all the terrific and unholy elements--fangs and poisons and eruptions,
+sharks and serpents--have each and all contributed something to the
+make-up. Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse.
+
+But the majority of mankind who take any interest in the God-question
+at all will probably always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and
+endow Him with personality.
+
+One feels like combating some of Emerson's conclusions, or, at least,
+like discounting them. His refusal to see any value in natural science
+as such, I think, shows his limitations. "Natural history," he says,
+"by itself has no value; it is like a single sex; but marry it to
+human history and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linnæus', and
+Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry." Of course he speaks
+for himself. Natural facts, scientific truth, as such, had no interest
+to him. One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to seed.
+
+"Shall I say that the use of Natural Science seems merely 'ancillary'
+to Morals? I would learn the law of the defraction of a ray because
+when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth
+in ethics." Is the ethical and poetic value of the natural sciences,
+then, their main or only value to the lay mind? Their technical
+details, their tables and formulæ and measurements, we may pass by,
+but the natural truths they disclose are of interest to the healthy
+mind for their own sake. It is not the ethics of chemical reactions
+and combinations--if there be ethics in them--that arrests our
+attention, but the light they throw on the problem of how the world
+was made, and how our own lives go on. The method of Nature in the
+physical world no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in the
+non-physical, or supersensuous world. But apart from that, it is
+incredible that a mind like Emerson's took no interest in natural
+knowledge for its own sake. The fact that two visible and inodorous
+gases like hydrogen and oxygen--one combustible and the other the
+supporter of combustion--when chemically combined produce water, which
+extinguishes fire, is intensely interesting as affording us a glimpse
+of the contradictions and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature's
+methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in it, let him have it
+who can extract it. The great facts of nature, such as the sphericity
+of the cosmic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual
+interdependence, the unprovable ether in which they float, the blue
+dome of the sky, the master currents of the ocean, the primary and the
+secondary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how they in any way
+illustrate the moral law is hard to see. The ethics, or right and
+wrong, of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no
+validity outside the human sphere. Might is right in Nature, or,
+rather, we are outside the standards of right and wrong in her sphere.
+Scientific knowledge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do not
+go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for rules for the conduct
+of life. We go to these things mainly for the satisfaction which the
+knowledge of Nature's ways gives us.
+
+So with natural history. For my own part I find the life-histories of
+the wild creatures about me, their ways of getting on in the world,
+their joys, their fears, their successes, their failures, their
+instincts, their intelligence, intensely interesting without any
+ulterior considerations. I am not looking for ethical or poetic
+values. I am looking for natural truths. I am less interested in the
+sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The
+significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does
+not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar
+weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for the winter than I am in
+this lesson. I had rather see a worm cast its skin than see a king
+crowned. I had rather see Phoebe building her mud nest than the
+preacher writing his sermon. I had rather see the big moth emerge from
+her cocoon--fresh and untouched as a coin that moment from the
+die--than the most fashionable "coming out" that society ever knew.
+The first song sparrow or bluebird or robin in spring, or the first
+hepatica or arbutus or violet, or the first clover or pond-lily in
+summer--must we demand some mystic password of them? Must we not love
+them for their own sake, ere they will seem worthy of our love?
+
+To convert natural facts into metaphysical values, or into moral or
+poetic values--in short, to make literature out of science--is a high
+achievement, and is worthy of Emerson at his best, but to claim that
+this is their sole or main use is to push idealism to the extreme. The
+poet, the artist, the nature writer not only mixes his colors with his
+brains, he mixes them with his heart's blood. Hence his pictures
+attract us without doing violence to nature.
+
+We will not deny Emerson his right to make poetry out of nature; we
+bless him for the inspiration he has drawn from this source, for his
+"Wood-notes," his "Humble-Bee," his "Titmouse," his "May-Day," his
+"Sea-Shore," his "Snow-Storm," and many other poems. But we must
+"quarrel" with him a little, to use one of his favorite words, for
+seeming to undervalue the facts of natural science, as such, and to
+belittle the works of the natural historian because he does not give
+us poetry and lessons in morals instead of botany and geology and
+ornithology, pure and simple. "Everything," he says, "should be
+treated poetically--law, politics, housekeeping, money. A judge and a
+banker must drive their craft poetically, as well as a dancer or a
+scribe. That is, they must exert that higher vision which causes the
+object to become fluid and plastic." "If you would write a code, or
+logarithms, or a cook-book, you cannot spare the poetic impulse." "No
+one will doubt that battles can be fought poetically who reads
+Plutarch or Las Casas."
+
+We are interested in the wild life around us because the lives of the
+wild creatures in a measure parallel our own; because they are the
+partakers of the same bounty of nature that we are; they are fruit of
+the same biological tree. We are interested in knowing how they get on
+in the world. Bird and bee, fish and man, are all made of one stuff,
+are all akin. The evolutionary impulse that brought man, brought his
+dog and horse. Did Emerson, indeed, only go to nature as he went to
+the bank, to make a draft upon it? Was his walk barren that brought
+him no image, no new idea? Was the day wasted that did not add a new
+line to his verse? He appears to have gone up and down the land
+seeking images. He was so firmly persuaded that there is not a passage
+in the human soul, perhaps not a shade of thought, but has its emblem
+in nature, that he was ever on the alert to discover these relations
+of his own mind to the external world. "I see the law of Nature
+equally exemplified in bar-room and in a saloon of the philosopher. I
+get instruction and the opportunities of my genius indifferently in
+all places, companies, and pursuits, so only there be antagonisms."
+
+Emerson thought that science as such bereaved Nature of her charm. To
+the man of little or no imagination or sensibility to beauty, Nature
+has no charm anyhow, but if he have these gifts, they will certainly
+survive scientific knowledge, and be quickened and heightened by it.
+
+After we have learned all that the astronomers can tell us about the
+midnight heavens, do we look up at the stars with less wonder and awe?
+After we have learned all that the chemist and the physicist can tell
+us about matter--its interior activities and its exterior laws and
+relations--do we admire and marvel less? After the geologist has told
+us all he has found out about the earth's crust and the rocks, when we
+quarry our building-stone, do we plough and hoe and plant its soil
+with less interest and veneration? No, science as the pursuit of truth
+causes light to spring out of the abysmal darkness, and enhances our
+love and interest in Nature. Is the return of the seasons less
+welcome because we know the cause? Is an eclipse less startling
+because it occurs exactly on time? Science bereaves Nature of her
+dread and fearsomeness, it breaks the spell which the ignorance and
+credulity of men have cast upon her.
+
+Emerson had little use for science except so far as it yielded him
+symbols and parables for his superscience. The electric spark did not
+kindle his interest unless it held an ethical fact for him; chemical
+reactions were dull affairs unless he could trace their laws in mental
+reactions. "Read chemistry a little," he said, "and you will quickly
+see that its laws and experiments will furnish an alphabet or
+vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in
+composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same
+substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical
+combination, and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the noblest
+chemistry that can extract sunshine from cucumbers, but that which can
+extract "honor from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from beggars,
+justice from thieves, benevolence from misers."
+
+Though mindful of the birds and flowers and trees and rivers in his
+walks, it was mainly through his pressing need of figures and symbols
+for transcendental use. He says, "Whenever you enumerate a physical
+law, I hear in it a moral law." His final interest was in the moral
+law. Unless the scientific fact you brought him had some moral value,
+it made little impression upon him.
+
+He admits he is more interested to know "why the star form is so oft
+repeated in botany, and why the number five is such a favorite with
+Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the
+formation of buds." His insight into Nature, and the prophetic
+character of his genius, are seen in many ways, among others in his
+anticipation or poetic forecast of the Darwinian theory of the origin
+of species, in 1853.
+
+"We want a higher logic to put us in training for the laws of
+creation. How does the step forward from one species to a higher
+species of an existing genus take place? The ass is not the parent of
+the horse; no fish begets a bird. But the concurrence of new
+conditions necessitates a new object in which these conditions meet
+and flower. When the hour is struck in onward nature, announcing that
+all is ready for the birth of higher form and nobler function, not one
+pair of parents, but the whole consenting system thrills, yearns, and
+produces. It is a favorable aspect of planets and of elements."
+
+In 1840 he wrote, "The method of advance in Nature is perpetual
+transformation." In the same year he wrote:
+
+"There is no leap--not a shock of violence throughout nature. Man
+therefore must be predicted in the first chemical relation exhibited
+by the first atom. If we had eyes to see it, this bit of quartz would
+certify us of the necessity that man must exist as inevitably as the
+cities he has actually built."
+
+X
+
+How fruitful in striking and original men New England was in those
+days--poets, orators, picturesque characters! In Concord, Emerson,
+Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott; in Boston and Cambridge, Lowell,
+Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, Father Taylor, Bancroft,
+Everett, and others, with Webster standing out like a Colossus on the
+New Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems to have been the
+aftermath of the Revolution. Will our social and industrial revolution
+bring anything like another such a crop? Will the great World War
+produce another? Until now too much prosperity, too much mammon, too
+much "at ease in Zion" has certainly prevailed for another band of
+great idealists to appear.
+
+Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. He was fairly
+hypnotized by the majesty and power of his mind and personality, and
+he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of
+primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man
+as Everett was of the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks.
+Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, "with those
+devouring eyes, with that portraying hand," had seen Webster. And this
+is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or
+Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight
+against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous,
+crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows,
+like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown_; the
+mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:--I have not traced as much of
+_silent Berserkir-rage_, that I remember of, in any other man."
+
+Emerson's description and praise and criticism of Webster form some of
+the most notable pages in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to
+Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried there, the fact so
+excited Emerson that he could not sleep. It was like the perturbation
+of a planet in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Emerson
+seems to have spent much time at the court-house to hear and study
+him: "Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get
+settled down to writing until he has well gone from the county. He is
+a natural Emperor of men." He adjourned the court every day in true
+imperial fashion, simply by rising and taking his hat and looking the
+Judge coolly in the face, whereupon the Judge "bade the Crier adjourn
+the Court." But when Emerson finally came to look upon him with the
+same feeling with which he saw one of those strong Paddies of the
+railroad, he lost his interest in the trial and did not return to the
+court in the afternoon. "The green fields on my way home were too
+fresh and fair, and forbade me to go again."
+
+It was with profound grief that he witnessed the decline of Webster's
+political career, owing to his truckling to the Southern proslavery
+element, and to his increasing intemperance. To see the placid,
+transcendental Emerson "fighting mad," flaring up in holy wrath, read
+his criticisms of Webster, after Webster's defection--his moral
+collapse to win the South and his support of the Fugitive Slave Law.
+This got into Emerson's blood and made him think "daggers and
+tomahawks." He has this to say of a chance meeting with Webster in
+Boston, at this period: "I saw Webster on the street--but he was
+changed since I saw him last--black as a thunder-cloud, and
+careworn.... I did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw
+me and would not meet my face."
+
+In 1851 he said that some of Webster's late speeches and state papers
+were like "Hail Columbia" when sung at a slave-auction; then he
+follows with the terrible remark: "The word _liberty_ in the mouth of
+Mr. Webster sounds like the word _love_ in the mouth of a courtezan."
+
+The prizes or fancied prizes of politics seem to have corrupted all
+the great men of that day--Webster, Choate, Foote, Clay, Everett.
+Their "disgusting obsequiousness" to the South fired Emerson's wrath.
+
+XI
+
+The orthodox brethren of his time, and probably of our time also, I
+fancy, could make very little of Emerson's religion. It was the
+religion of the spirit and not of the utilitarian and matter-of-fact
+understanding. It identified man with God and made all nature
+symbolical of the spirit. He was never tired of repeating that all
+true prayers answered themselves--the spirit which the act of prayer
+begets in one's self is the answer. Your prayer for humility, for
+charity, for courage, begets these emotions in the mind. The devout
+asking comes from a perception of their value. Hence the only real
+prayers are for spiritual good. We converse with spiritual and
+invisible things only through the medium of our own hearts. The
+preliminary attitude of mind that moves us to face in this direction
+is the blessing. The soldier who, on the eve of battle, prays for
+courage, has already got what he asks for. Prayer for visible,
+material good is infidelity to the moral law. God is within you, more
+your better self than you are. Many prayers are a rattling of empty
+husks. Emerson says the wise man in the storm prays God, not for
+safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
+
+Although Emerson broke away from all religious forms, yet was there
+something back of them that he always respected, as do we all. He
+relates that one night at a hotel a stranger intruded into his chamber
+after midnight, claiming a share in it. "But after his lamp had smoked
+the chamber full, and I had turned round to the wall in despair, the
+man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside, and made in low
+whispers a long earnest prayer. Then was the relation entirely changed
+between us. I fretted no more, but respected and liked him."
+
+Contrasting his own case with that of so many young men who owed their
+religious training exclusively to Cambridge and other public
+institutions, he says: "How much happier was my star which rained on
+me influence of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious
+sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and
+derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly
+lives and godly deeds of sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was
+itself a culture, an education."
+
+XII
+
+A course of ten lectures which he delivered in Boston in February,
+1840, on the "Present Age" gave him little pleasure. He could not warm
+up, get agitated, and so warm and agitate others: "A cold mechanical
+preparation for a delivery as decorous,--fine things, pretty things,
+wise things,--but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no
+transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment." Because he lacked
+constitutional vigor, he could expend only, say, twenty-one hours on
+each lecture, if he would be able and ready for the next. If he could
+only rally the lights and mights of sixty hours into twenty, he said,
+he should hate himself less. Self-criticism was a notable trait with
+him. Of self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and enemies
+rarely said severer things of him than he said of himself. He was
+almost morbidly conscious of his own defects, both as a man and as a
+writer. There are many pages of self-criticism in the Journals, but
+not one of self-praise. In 1842 he writes: "I have not yet adjusted my
+relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too
+young, or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?"
+Later he sighs, "If only I could be set aglow!" He had wished for a
+professorship, or for a pulpit, much as he reacted from the
+church--something to give him the stimulus of a stated task. Some
+friend recommended an Abolition campaign to him: "I doubt not a course
+in mobs would do me good."
+
+Then he refers to his faults as a writer: "I think I have material
+enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was
+not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots."
+
+Emerson felt his own bardic character, but lamented that he had so few
+of the bardic gifts. At the age of fifty-nine he says: "I am a bard
+least of bards. I cannot, like them, make lofty arguments in stately,
+continuous verse, constraining the rocks, trees, animals, and the
+periodic stars to say my thoughts,--for that is the gift of great
+poets; but I am a bard because I stand near them, and apprehend all
+they utter, and with pure joy hear that which I also would say, and,
+moreover, I speak interruptedly words and half stanzas which have the
+like scope and aim:"
+
+    "What I cannot declare, yet cannot all withhold."
+
+There is certainly no over-valuation in this sentence, made when he
+was sixty-two: "In the acceptance that my papers find among my
+thoughtful countrymen, in these days, I cannot help seeing how limited
+is their reading. If they read only the books that I do, they would
+not exaggerate so wildly." Two years before that he had said, "I often
+think I could write a criticism of Emerson that would hit the white."
+
+Emerson was a narrow-chested, steeple-shouldered man with a tendency
+to pulmonary disease, against which he made a vigorous fight all his
+days. He laments his feeble physical equipment in his poem,
+"Terminus":
+
+    "Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
+    Bad husbands of their fires,
+    Who, when they gave thee breath,
+    Failed to bequeath
+    The needful sinew stark as once,
+    The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
+    But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
+    Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
+    Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
+    Amid the gladiators, halt and numb."
+
+And yet, looking back near the end of his life, he says that
+considering all facts and conditions he thinks he has had triumphant
+health.
+
+XIII
+
+Emerson's wisdom and catholicity of spirit always show in his
+treatment of the larger concerns of life and conduct. How remarkable
+is this passage written in Puritanic New England in 1842:
+
+     I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst of rich,
+     decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well-nigh persuaded
+     to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her friends, who are also
+     my friends, lamented to me the growth of this inclination.
+     But I told them that I think she is to be greatly
+     congratulated on the event. She has lived in great poverty
+     of events. In form and years a woman, she is still a child,
+     having had no experiences, and although of a fine, liberal,
+     susceptible, expanding nature, has never yet found any
+     worthy object of attention; has not been in love, nor been
+     called out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly
+     wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she shall
+     find what she needs, in a power to call out the slumbering
+     religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that the guide who
+     has led her into this path is a young girl of a lively,
+     forcible, but quite external character, who teaches her the
+     historical argument for the Catholic faith. I told A. that I
+     hoped she would not be misled by attaching any importance to
+     that. If the offices of the church attracted her, if its
+     beautiful forms and humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine
+     and St. Bernard, Jesus and Madonna, cathedral music and
+     masses, then go, for thy dear heart's sake, but do not go
+     out of this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an
+     icehouse again of external. At all events, I charged her to
+     pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange
+     thoroughly.
+
+And this on the Church and the common people written the year before:
+
+     The Church aërates my good neighbors and serves them as a
+     somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a clean shirt or a
+     bath or a shampooing. The minister is a functionary and the
+     meeting-house a functionary; they are one and, when they
+     have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the
+     Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in
+     social and public and ideal relations beyond
+     neighborhood,--higher than the town-meeting--to their fellow
+     men. They marry, and the minister who represents this high
+     public, celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and
+     again they are published by his intervention. One of their
+     family dies, he comes again, and the family go up publicly
+     to the church to be publicised or churched in this official
+     sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as it goes. It is
+     homage to the Ideal Church, which they have not: which the
+     actual Church so foully misrepresents. But it is better so
+     than nohow. These people have no fine arts, no literature,
+     no great men to boswellize, no fine speculation to entertain
+     their family board or their solitary toil with. Their talk
+     is of oxen and pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever
+     liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever
+     spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the Church
+     is their fact for such things. It has not been discredited
+     in their eyes as books, lectures, or living men of genius
+     have been. It is still to them the accredited symbol of the
+     religious Idea. The Church is not to be defended against any
+     spiritualist clamoring for its reform, but against such as
+     say it is expedient to shut it up and have none, this much
+     may be said. It stands in the history of the present time as
+     a high school for the civility and mansuetude of the people.
+     (I might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the
+     medium of those superior ablutions described above, only
+     that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Lyceum, as yet
+     an open and uncommitted organ, free to admit the
+     ministrations of any inspired man that shall pass by: whilst
+     the other churches are committed and will exclude him.)
+
+     I should add that, although this is the real account to be
+     given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet
+     it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that
+     it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the
+     woods of New Hampshire to Boston and serves his
+     apprenticeship in a shop, and now opens his own store, to
+     hang up his name in bright gold letters a foot long? His
+     father could not write his name: it is only lately that he
+     could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun shines on
+     it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact
+     in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make
+     it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his
+     son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state:
+     a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this
+     name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he
+     is at least made responsible and thoughtful by his public
+     relation of a seen and aërated name.
+
+     Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life
+     which he meets with; how to do with few and easily gotten
+     things: but let him seize with enthusiasm the opportunity of
+     doing what he can, for the virtues are natural to each man
+     and the talents are little perfections.
+
+     Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.
+
+     Nothing is so young and untaught as time.
+
+How wise is his saying that we do not turn to the books of the
+Bible--St. Paul and St. John--to start us on our task, as we do to
+Marcus Aurelius, or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or
+Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes"! "It comes with a
+certain official claim against which the mind revolts. The Bible has
+its own nobilities--might well be charming if left simply on its
+merits, as other books are, but this, 'You must,' 'It is your duty,'
+in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the introduction of martial
+law into Concord. If you should dot our farms with picket lines, and I
+could not go or come across lots without a pass, I should resist, or
+else emigrate. If Concord were as beautiful as Paradise, it would be
+as detestable to me."
+
+In his essays and letters Emerson gives one the impression of never
+using the first words that come to mind, nor the second, but the third
+or fourth; always a sense of selection, of deliberate choice. To use
+words in a novel way, and impart a little thrill of surprise, seemed
+to be his aim. This effort of selection often mars his page. He is
+rarely carried away by his thought, but he snares or captures it with
+a word. He does not feel first and think second; he thinks first, and
+the feeling does not always follow. He dearly loved writing; it was
+the joy of his life, but it was a conscious intellectual effort. It
+was often a kind of walking on stilts; his feet are not on the common
+ground. And yet--and yet--what a power he was, and how precious his
+contributions!
+
+He says in his Journal, "I have observed long since that to give the
+thought a full and just expression I must not prematurely utter it."
+This hesitation, this studied selection robs him of the grace of
+felicity and spontaneity. The compensation is often a sense of novelty
+and a thrill of surprise. Moreover, he avoids the commonplace and the
+cheap and tedious. His product is always a choice one, and is seen to
+have a quality of its own. No page has more individuality than his,
+and none is so little like the page of the ordinary professional
+writer.
+
+'Tis a false note to speak of Emerson's doctrines, as Henry James did.
+He had no doctrines. He had leading ideas, but he had no system, no
+argument. It was his attitude of mind and spirit that was significant
+and original. He would have nothing to do with stereotyped opinions.
+What he said to-day might contradict what he said yesterday, or what
+he might say to-morrow. No matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a
+sphere that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any other writer
+stood for the contradictory character of spiritual truth. Truth is
+what we make it--what takes the imprint of one's mind; it is not a
+definite something like gold or silver, it is any statement that fits
+our mental make-up, that comes home to us. What comes home in one mood
+may not come home in another.
+
+Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas about God. Personality
+and impersonality might both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what
+may not be affirmed of it in our own minds?
+
+The good of such a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his
+spirit, his heroic attitude, his consonance with the universal mind.
+His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the
+hard facts of life and experience.
+
+XIV
+
+Emerson records in his Journal: "I have been writing and speaking what
+were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have
+not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that
+it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from
+any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in
+driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?--they would
+interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school
+follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if
+it did not create independence."
+
+It is never easy to stray far from the master in high moral, æsthetic,
+and literary matters and be on the safe side; we are only to try to
+escape his individual bias, to break over his limitations and "brave
+the landscape's look" with our own eyes. We are to be more on guard
+against his affinities, his unconscious attractions and repulsions,
+than against his ethical and intellectual conclusions, if one may make
+that distinction, which I know is hazardous business. We readily
+impose our own limitations upon others and see the world as old when
+we are old.
+
+Emerson criticized Carlyle because Carlyle was not Emerson, just as
+Carlyle criticized Emerson because he was not Carlyle. We are all poor
+beggars in this respect; each of us is the victim of his own demon.
+Beware of the predilection of the master! When his temperament impels
+him he is no longer a free man.
+
+We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to see anything in
+Hawthorne's work; they had "no inside to them"; "it would take him and
+Alcott together to make a man"; and, again, in his rather
+contemptuous disposal of Poe as "the jingle man" and his verdict upon
+Shelley as "never a poet"! The intellectual content of Shelley's work
+is not great; but that he was not a poet, in fact that he was anything
+else but a poet, though not of the highest order, is contrary to the
+truth, I think. Limitations like this are not infrequent in Emerson.
+Yet Emerson was a great critic of men and of books. A highly
+interesting volume showing him in this character could be compiled
+from the Journals.
+
+Emerson and Hawthorne were near neighbors for several years. Emerson
+liked the man better than his books. They once had a good long walk
+together; they walked to Harvard village and back, occupying a couple
+of days and walking about twenty miles a day. They had much
+conversation--talked of Scott and Landor and others. They found the
+bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull places. The Temperance Society had
+emptied them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one of them, but
+"was soon out on the piazza." Hawthorne, Emerson said, was more
+inclined to play Jove than Mercury. It is a pleasing picture--these
+two men, so unlike, but both typical of New England and both men of a
+high order of genius, walking in friendly converse along the country
+roads in the golden September days over seventy years ago. Emerson
+always regretted that he never succeeded in "conquering a friendship"
+with Hawthorne, mainly because they had so few traits in common. To
+the satisfaction of silent intercourse with men Emerson was clearly a
+stranger. There must be an interchange of ideas; the feeling of
+comradeship, the communion of congenial souls was not enough.
+Hawthorne, shy, silent, rather gloomy, yet there must have been a
+charm about his mere presence that more than made up for his want of
+conversation. His silence was golden. Emerson was a transcendental
+Yankee and was always bent on driving sharp bargains in the
+interchange of ideas with the persons he met. He did not propose to
+swap horses or watches or jack-knives, but he would swap ideas with
+you day in and day out. If you had no ideas to swap, he lost interest
+in you.
+
+The wisdom of a great creative artist like Hawthorne does not
+necessarily harden into bright epigrammatic sayings or rules for the
+conduct of life, and the available intellectual content of his works
+to the Emersonian type of mind may be small; but his interior, his
+emotional and imaginative richness may much more than make it up. The
+scholar, the sayer of things, must always rank below the creator, or
+the maker of things.
+
+Philosophers contradict themselves like other mortals. Here and there
+in his Journals Emerson rails against good nature, and says "tomahawks
+are better." "Why should they call me good-natured? I, too, like
+puss, have a tractile claw." And he declares that he likes the sayers
+of No better than the sayers of Yes, and that he preferred hard
+clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners. In another mood, or from
+another point of view, he says of a man, "Let him go into his closet
+and pray the Divinity to make him so great as to be good-natured." And
+again, "How great it is to do a little, as, for instance, to deserve
+the praise of good nature, or of humility, or of punctuality."
+
+Emerson's characterization of himself as always a painter is
+interesting. People, he said, came to his lectures with expectation
+that he was to realize the Republic he described, and they ceased to
+come when they found this reality no nearer: "They mistook me. I am
+and always was a painter. I paint still with might and main and choose
+the best subject I can. Many have I seen come and go with false hopes
+and fears, and dubiously affected by my pictures. But I paint on." "I
+portray the ideal, not the real," he might have added. He was a
+poet-seer and not a historian. He was a painter of ideas, as Carlyle
+was a painter of men and events. Always is there an effort at vivid
+and artistic expression. If his statement does not kindle the
+imagination, it falls short of his aim. He visualizes his most subtle
+and abstract conceptions--sees the idea wedded to its correlative in
+the actual world. A new figure, a fresh simile gave him a thrill of
+pleasure. He went hawking up and down the fields of science, of trade,
+of agriculture, of nature, seeking them. He thinks in symbols, he
+paints his visions of the ideal with pigments drawn from the world all
+about him. To call such men as Emerson and Carlyle painters is only to
+emphasize their artistic temperaments. Their seriousness, their
+devotion to high moral and intellectual standards, only lift them, as
+they do Whitman, out of the world of mere decorative art up to the
+world of heroic and creative art where art as such does not obtrude
+itself.
+
+XV
+
+Emerson wonders why it is that man eating does not attract the
+imagination or attract the artist: "Why is our diet and table not
+agreeable to the imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without
+shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the browsing ox, the lion
+leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man
+eating. The difference seems to consist in the presence or absence of
+the world at the feast. The diet is base, be it what it may, that is
+hidden in caves or cellars or houses.... Did you ever eat your bread
+on the top of a mountain, or drink water there? Did you ever camp out
+with lumbermen or travellers in the prairie? Did you ever eat the
+poorest rye or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness? and
+did you not find that the mixture of sun and sky with your bread gave
+it a certain mundane savour and comeliness?"
+
+I do not think Emerson hits on the true explanation of why man feeding
+is not an attractive subject for the painter. It is not that the diet
+is base and is hidden in caves and cellars, or that the world is not
+present at the feast. It is because eating is a purely selfish animal
+occupation; there is no touch of the noble or the idyllic or the
+heroic in it. In the act man confesses his animal nature; he is no
+longer an Emerson, a Dante, a Plato--he is simply a physiological
+contrivance taking in nutriment. The highest and the lowest are for
+the moment on the same level. The lady and her maid, the lord and his
+lackey are all one. Eating your bread on a mountain-top or in the camp
+of lumbermen or with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness adds a new
+element. Here the picture has all nature for a background and the
+imagination is moved. The rye and the oatcake now become a kind of
+heavenly manna, or, as Fitzgerald has it, under such conditions the
+wilderness is Paradise enow. The simple act of feeding does not now
+engross the attention. Associate with the act of eating any worthy or
+noble idea, and it is at once lifted to a higher level. A mother
+feeding her child, a cook passing food to the tramp at the door or to
+other hungry and forlorn wayfarers, or soldiers pausing to eat their
+rations in the field, or fishermen beside the stream, or the haymakers
+with their lunch under a tree--in all such incidents there are
+pictorial elements because the least part of it all to the looker-on
+is the act of eating.
+
+In Da Vinci's "Last Supper" the mere animal act of taking food plays
+no part; the mind is occupied with higher and more significant things.
+A suggestion of wine or of fruit in a painting may be agreeable, but
+from a suggestion of the kitchen and the cook we turn away. The
+incident of some of Washington's officers during the Revolution
+entertaining some British officers (an historical fact) on baked
+potatoes and salt would appeal to the artistic imagination. All the
+planting and reaping of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants,
+as is so much of our whole industrial activity; but art looks kindly
+upon much of it, shows us more or less in partnership with primal
+energies. People surrounding a table after all signs of the dinner
+have been removed hold the elements of an agreeable picture, because
+that suggests conversation and social intercourse--a feast of reason
+and a flow of soul. We are no longer animals; we have moved up many
+degrees higher in the scale of human values.
+
+Emerson's deep love and admiration for Carlyle come out many times in
+the Journals. No other literary man of his times moved and impressed
+him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which lasted upwards of
+forty years, is the most valuable correspondence known to me in
+English literature. It is a history of the growth and development of
+these two remarkable minds.
+
+I lately reread the Correspondence, mainly to bring my mind again in
+contact with these noble spirits, so much more exalted than any in our
+own time, but partly to see what new light the letters threw upon the
+lives of these two men.
+
+There is little of the character of intimate and friendly letters in
+these remarkable documents. It is not Dear Tom or Dear Waldo. It is
+Dear Emerson or Dear Carlyle. They are not letters, they are epistles,
+like Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, or to the Thessalonians, or to
+the Romans. Each of them contains the fragments of a gospel that both
+were preaching, each in his own way, but at bottom the same--the
+beauty and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, the moral
+law and our duty to God and man will stand. These two men, so
+different in character and temperament, were instantly drawn together
+by that magnet--the moral sentiment. Carlyle's works were occupied
+almost entirely with men--with history, biography, political events,
+and government; Emerson's with ideas, nature, and poetry; yet the bed
+rock in each was the same. Both preached an evangel, but how
+different!
+
+Emerson makes a note of the days on which he received a letter from,
+or wrote one to, his great Scottish friend. Both were important events
+with him. It is evident that Emerson makes more of an effort to write
+his best in these letters than does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off
+with more ease and unconscious mastery. The exchange is always in
+favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, the more prodigious
+personality, and had the advantage in the richness and venerableness
+of the Old World setting. But Emerson did not hesitate to discount him
+in his letters and in his Journals, very wisely sometimes, not so
+wisely at others.
+
+"O Carlyle, the merit of glass is not to be seen, but to be seen
+through; but every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle glass is
+visible." Of course Carlyle might reply that stained glass has other
+merits than transparency, or he might ask: Why should an author's
+style be compared to glass anyhow, since it is impossible to
+dissociate it from the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to
+reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. There is the charm and
+witchery of style, as in Emerson's own best pages, as well as the
+worth of the subject-matter. Is it not true that in the description of
+any natural object or scene or event we want something more than to
+see it through a perfectly transparent medium? We want the added charm
+or illusion of the writer's own way of seeing it, the hue of his own
+spirit.
+
+I think we may admit all this--doubtless Emerson would admit it--and
+yet urge that Carlyle's style had many faults of the kind Emerson
+indicated. It thrusts itself too much upon the reader's attention. His
+prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most
+transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best
+is very pleasing; at its worst it becomes a wearisome mannerism. When
+a writer's style gets into a rut his reader is not happy. Ease,
+flexibility, transparency, though it be colored transparency, are
+among the merits we want.
+
+The most just and penetrating thing Emerson ever said about Carlyle is
+recorded in his Journal in 1847: "In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is much
+more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly
+superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits
+all the time. There is more character than intellect in every
+sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." Criticism like
+this carries the force and conviction of a scientific analysis.
+
+The Journals abound in similar illuminating bits of criticism directed
+to nearly all the more noted authors of English literature, past and
+present. In science we do want an absolutely colorless, transparent
+medium, but in literature the personality of the writer is everything.
+The born writer gives us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as
+a man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emerson's, or out of
+Arnold's, the savor of the man's inborn quality--the savor of that
+which acts over and above his will--and we have robbed them of their
+distinctive quality. Literature is always truth of some sort, plus a
+man. No one knew this better than Emerson himself. Another remark of
+Emerson's, made when he was twenty-seven years old, has high literary
+value:
+
+"There is no beauty in words except in their collocation."
+
+It is not beautiful words that make beautiful poetry, or beautiful
+prose, but ordinary words beautifully arranged. The writer who hopes
+by fine language to invoke fine ideas is asking the tailor to turn him
+out a fine man. First get your great idea, and you will find it is
+already fitly clothed. The image of the clothes in this connection is,
+of course, a very inadequate and misleading one, since language is the
+thought or its vital integument, and not merely its garment. We often
+praise a writer for his choice of words, and Emerson himself says in
+the same paragraph from which I quote the above: "No man can write
+well who thinks there is no choice of words for him." There is always
+a right word and every other than that is wrong. There is always the
+best word, or the best succession of words to give force and vividness
+to the idea. All painters use the same colors, all musicians use the
+same notes, all sculptors use the same marble, all architects use the
+same materials and all writers use essentially the same words, their
+arrangement and combination alone making the difference in the various
+products. Nature uses the same elements in her endless variety of
+living things; their different arrangement and combinations, and some
+interior necessity which we have to call the animating principle, is
+the secret of the individuality of each.
+
+Of course we think in words or images, and no man can tell which is
+first, or if there is any first in such matters--the thought or the
+word--any more than the biochemist can tell us which is first in the
+living body, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, or the living
+force that weaves itself a corporeal garment out of these elements.
+
+XVI
+
+Emerson hungered for the quintessence of things, their last
+concentrated, intensified meanings, for the pith and marrow of men and
+events, and not for their body and bulk. He wanted the ottar of roses
+and not a rose garden, the diamond and not a mountain of carbon. This
+bent gives a peculiar beauty and stimulus to his writings, while at
+the same time it makes the reader crave a little more body and
+substance. The succulent leaf and stalk of certain garden vegetables
+is better to one's liking than the more pungent seed. If Emerson
+could only have given us the essence of Father Taylor's copious,
+eloquent, flesh-and-blood discourses, how it would have delighted us!
+or if he could only have got the silver out of Alcott's bewitching
+moonshine--that would have been worth while!
+
+But why wish Emerson had been some other than he was? He was at least
+the quintessence of New England Puritanism, its last and deepest
+meaning and result, lifted into the regions of ethics and æsthetics.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FLIES IN AMBER
+
+
+It has been the fashion among our younger writers to speak slightingly
+and flippantly of Emerson, referring to him as outworn, and as the
+apostle of the obvious. This view is more discreditable to the young
+people than is their criticism damaging to Emerson. It can make little
+difference to Emerson's fame, but it would be much more becoming in
+our young writers to garland his name with flowers than to utter these
+harsh verdicts.
+
+It is undoubtedly true that Emerson entered into and influenced the
+lives of more choice spirits, both men and women, during the past
+generation than did any other American author. Whether he still does
+so would be interesting to know. We who have felt his tonic and
+inspiring influence can but hope so. Yet how impossible he seems in
+times like these in which we live, when the stars of the highest
+heaven of the spirit which illumine his page are so obscured or
+blotted out by the dust and the fog of our hurrying, materialistic
+age! Try to think of Emerson spending a winter going about the Western
+States reading to miscellaneous audiences essays like those that now
+make up his later volumes. What chance would he stand, even in
+university towns, as against the "movies" (a word so ugly I hesitate
+to write it) in the next street?
+
+I once defended Emerson against a criticism of Matthew Arnold's. It is
+true, as Arnold says, that Emerson is not a great writer, except on
+rare occasions. Now and then, especially in his earlier essays, there
+is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution,
+growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph
+follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a
+kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the
+incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read
+as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon
+became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned
+argument. Pictures and parables and startling affirmations suited
+better. Emerson did not stoop to his audience; there was no
+condescension in him. The last time I heard him, which was in
+Washington in the early seventies, his theme was "Manners," and much
+of it passed over the heads of his audience.
+
+Certain of Emerson's works must strike the average reader, when he
+first looks into them, as a curious medley of sense and wild
+extravagance, utterly lacking in the logical sequence of the best
+prose, and often verging on the futile and the absurd. Yet if one does
+not get discouraged, one will soon see running through them veins of
+the purest gold of the spirit, and insight into Nature's ways, that
+redeem and more than redeem them.
+
+I recall that when, as a young man, I looked into them the first time,
+I could make nothing of them. I was fresh from reading the standard
+essayists and philosophers of English literature--Addison, Steele,
+Cowley, Johnson, Locke--and the poems of Pope, Young, and Cowper, all
+of ethical import and value, and sometimes didactic, but never
+mystical and transcendental, and the plunge into Emerson was a leap
+into a strange world. But a few years later, when I opened his essays
+again, they were like spring-water to parched lips. Now, in my old
+age, I go back to him with a half-sad pleasure, as one goes back to
+the scenes of one's youth.
+
+Emerson taught us a mingled poetic and prophetic way of looking at
+things that stays with us. The talented English woman Anne Gilchrist
+said we had outgrown Emerson; had absorbed all he had to give us; and
+were leaving him behind. Of course he was always a teacher and
+preacher, in the thrall of his priestly inheritance, and to that
+extent we leave him behind as we do not leave behind works of pure
+literature.
+
+As to continuity, some of his essays have much more of it than others.
+In his "Nature" the theme is unfolded, there is growth and evolution;
+and his first and second series of Essays likewise show it. The essays
+on "Character," on "Self-Reliance," on the "Over-Soul," meet the
+requirements of sound prose. And if there is any sounder prose than
+can be found in his "Nature," or in his "English Traits," or in his
+historical and biographical addresses, I do not know where to find it.
+How flat and commonplace seem the works of some of the masters of
+prose to whom Arnold alludes--Cicero, Voltaire, Addison,
+Swift--compared with those of Emerson! A difference like that between
+the prismatic hues of raindrops suspended from a twig or a trellis in
+the sunlight and the water in the spring or the brook.
+
+But in Emerson's later work there is, as geologists say, nonconformity
+between the strata which make up his paragraphs. There is only
+juxtaposition. Among his later papers the one on "Wealth" flows along
+much more than the one on "Fate." Emerson believed in wealth. Poverty
+did not attract him. It was not suited to his cast of mind. Poverty
+was humiliating. Emerson accumulated a fortune, and it added to his
+self-respect. Thoreau's pride in his poverty must have made Emerson
+shiver.
+
+Although Arnold refused to see in Emerson a great writer, he did admit
+that he was eminent as the "friend and aider of those who would live in
+the spirit"; but Arnold apparently overlooked the fact that, devoid of
+the merit of good literature, no man's writings could have high
+spiritual value. Strip the Bible of its excellence as literature, and
+you have let out its life-blood. Literature is not a varnish or a
+polish. It is not a wardrobe. It is the result of a vital, imaginative
+relation of the man to his subject. And Emerson's subject-matter at its
+best always partakes of the texture of his own mind. It is admitted that
+there are times when his writing lacks organization,--the vital
+ties,--when his rhetoric is more like a rocking-horse or a
+merry-go-round than like the real thing. But there are few writers who
+do not mark time now and then, and Emerson is no exception; and I
+contend that at his best his work has the sequence and evolution of all
+great prose. And yet, let me say that if Emerson's power and influence
+depended upon his logic, he would be easily disposed of. Fortunately
+they do not. They depend, let me repeat, upon his spiritual power and
+insight, and the minor defects I am pointing out are only like flies in
+amber.
+
+He thought in images more strictly than any other contemporary writer,
+and was often desperately hard-put to it to make his thought wed his
+image. He confessed that he did not know how to argue, and that he
+could only say what he saw. But he had spiritual vision; we cannot
+deny this, though we do deny him logical penetration. I doubt if
+there ever was a writer of such wide and lasting influence as Emerson,
+in whom the logical sense was so feeble and shadowy. He had in this
+respect a feminine instead of a masculine mind, an intuitional instead
+of a reasoning one. It made up in audacious, often extravagant,
+affirmations what it lacked in syllogistic strength. The logical mind,
+with its sense of fitness and proportion, does not strain or
+over-strain the thread that knits the parts together. It does not jump
+to conclusions, but reaches them step by step. The flesh and blood of
+feeling and sentiment may clothe the obscure framework of logic, but
+the logic is there all the same. Emerson's mind was as devoid of
+logical sense as are our remembered dreams, or as Christian Science is
+of science. He said that truth ceased to be such when polemically
+stated. Occasionally he amplifies and unfolds an idea, as in the
+essays already mentioned, but generally his argument is a rope of
+sand. Its strength is the strength of the separate particles. He is
+perpetually hooking things together that do not go together. It is
+like putting an apple on a pumpkin vine, or an acorn on a hickory. "A
+club foot and a club wit." "Why should we fear," he says, "to be
+crushed by the same elements--we who are made up of the same
+elements?" But were we void of fear, we should be crushed much oftener
+than we are. The electricity in our bodies does not prevent us from
+being struck by lightning, nor the fluids in our bodies prevent the
+waters from drowning us, nor the carbon in our bodies prevent carbon
+dioxide from poisoning us.
+
+One of Emerson's faults as a writer arose from his fierce hunger for
+analogy. "I would rather have a good symbol of my thought," he
+confesses, "than the suffrage of Kant or of Plato." "All thinking is
+analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy." His passion
+for analogy betrays him here and there in his Journals, as in this
+passage: "The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does fire
+or wind or tree. Neither does a noble natural man," and so forth. If
+water and fire and wind and tree were in the habit of talking of
+anything else, this kind of a comparison would not seem so spurious.
+
+A false note in rhetoric like the above you will find in Emerson
+oftener than a false note in taste. I find but one such in the
+Journals: "As soon as a man gets his suction-hose down into the great
+deep, he belongs to no age, but is an eternal man." That I call an
+ignoble image, and one cannot conceive of Emerson himself printing
+such a passage.
+
+We hear it said that Whittier is the typical poet of New England. It
+may be so, but Emerson is much the greater poet. Emerson is a poet of
+the world, while Whittier's work is hardly known abroad at all.
+Emerson is known wherever the English language is spoken. Not that
+Emerson is in any sense a popular poet, such as, for example, Burns or
+Byron, but he is the poet of the choice few, of those who seek poetry
+that has some intellectual or spiritual content. Whittier wrote many
+happy descriptions of New England scenes and seasons. "The Tent on the
+Beach" and "Snow-Bound" come readily to mind; "The Playmate" is a
+sweet poem, full of tender and human affection, but not a great poem.
+Whittier had no profundity. Is not a Quaker poet necessarily narrow?
+Whittier gave voice to the New England detestation of slavery, but by
+no means so forcibly and profoundly as did Emerson. He had a theology,
+but not a philosophy. I wonder if his poems are still read.
+
+In his chapter called "Considerations by the Way," Emerson strikes
+this curious false note in his rhetoric: "We have a right to be here
+or we should not be here. We have the same right to be here that Cape
+Cod and Sandy Hook have to be there." As if Cape Cod or Cape Horn or
+Sandy Hook had any "rights"! This comparison of man with inanimate
+things occurs in both Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau sins in this way at
+least once when he talks of the Attic wit of burning thorns and
+briars. There is a similar false note in such a careful writer as Dean
+Swift. He says to his young poet, "You are ever to try a good poem as
+you would a sound pipkin, and if it rings well upon the knuckle, be
+sure there is no flaw in it." Whitman compares himself with an
+inanimate thing in the line:
+
+    "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by."
+
+But he claims no moral or human attributes or rights for his level; it
+simply acts in obedience to the principle it embodies--the law of
+gravitation.
+
+The lecturer "gets away" with such things better than the writer. An
+audience is not critical about such matters, but the reader takes note
+of them. Mosaics will do on the platform, or in the pulpit, but will
+not bear the nearer view of the study.
+
+The incongruities of Emerson are seen in such passages as this: "Each
+plant has its parasites, and each created thing its lover and poet,"
+as if there were any relation between the two clauses of this
+sentence--between parasites and lovers and poets! As if one should
+say, "Woodchucks are often alive with fleas, and our fruit trees bloom
+in May."
+
+Emerson was so emboldened by what had been achieved through the
+mastery of the earth's forces that he was led to say that "a wise
+geology shall yet make the earthquake harmless, and the volcano an
+agricultural resource." But this seems expecting too much. We have
+harnessed the lightnings, but the earthquake is too deep and too
+mighty for us. It is a steed upon which we cannot lay our hands. The
+volcano we may draw upon for heat and steam, as we do upon the winds
+and streams for power, but it is utterly beyond our control. The
+bending of the earth's crust beneath the great atmospheric waves is
+something we cannot bridle. The tides by sea as by land are beyond us.
+
+Emerson had the mind of the prophet and the seer, and was given to
+bold affirmations. The old Biblical distinction between the scribes
+and the man who speaks with authority still holds. We may say of all
+other New England essayists and poets--Lowell, Whipple, Tuckerman,
+Holmes, Hillard, Whittier, Longfellow--that they are scribes only.
+Emerson alone speaks as one having authority--the authority of the
+spirit. "Thus saith the Lord"--it is this tone that gives him his
+authority the world over.
+
+I never tire of those heroic lines of his in which he sounds a
+battle-cry to the spirit:
+
+    "Though love repine, and reason chafe,
+      There came a voice without reply,--
+    ''T is man's perdition to be safe,
+      When for the truth he ought to die.'"
+
+The last time I saw Emerson was at the Holmes seventieth-birthday
+breakfast in 1879. The serious break in his health had resulted in a
+marked aphasia, so that he could not speak the name of his nearest
+friend, nor answer the simplest question. Yet he was as serene as
+ever. Let the heavens fall--what matters it to me? his look seemed to
+say.
+
+Emerson's face had in it more of what we call the divine than had that
+of any other author of his time--that wonderful, kindly, wise
+smile--the smile of the soul--not merely the smile of good nature, but
+the smile of spiritual welcome and hospitality.
+
+Emerson had quality. A good Emersonian will recognize any passage from
+the Sage in a book of quotations, even if no name is appended.
+
+We speak of Emerson as outgrown, yet only yesterday I saw in J. Arthur
+Thomson's recent Gifford Lectures on "The System of Animate Nature,"
+repeated quotations from Emerson, mainly from his poetry. I think he
+is no more likely to be outgrown than are Wordsworth and Arnold. Yet I
+do not set the same value upon his poetry that I do upon that of
+Wordsworth at his best.
+
+Emerson is the last man we should expect to be guilty of
+misinterpreting Nature, yet he does so at times. He does so in this
+passage: "If Nature wants a thumb, she makes it at the cost of the
+arms and legs." As if the arm were weaker or less efficient because of
+the thumb. What would man's power be as a tool-using animal without
+his strong, opposable thumb? His grasp would be gone.
+
+He says truly that the gruesome, the disgusting, the repellent are not
+fit subjects for cabinet pictures. The "sacred subjects" to which he
+objects probably refer to the Crucifixion--the nails through the hands
+and feet, and the crown of thorns. But to jump from that fact to the
+assertion that Nature covers up the skeleton on the same grounds, is
+absurd. Do not all vertebrates require an osseous system? In the
+radiates and articulates she puts the bony system on the outside, but
+when she comes to her backbone animals, she perforce puts her osseous
+system beneath. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and
+skin and hair over it, not to hide it, but to use it. Would you have a
+man like a jellyfish?
+
+The same want of logic marks Carlyle's mind when he says: "The drop by
+continually falling bores its way through the hardest rock. The hasty
+torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace
+behind." But give the "hasty torrent" the same time you give the drop,
+and see what it will do to the rock!
+
+Emerson says, "A little more or a little less does not signify
+anything." But it does signify in this world of material things. Is
+one man as impressive as an army, one tree as impressive as a forest?
+"Scoop a little water in the hollow of your palm; take up a handful of
+shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but acres
+of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? A little more or
+a little less signifies nothing." It is the mass that does impress us,
+as Niagara does, as the midnight sky does. It is not as parts of this
+"astonishing astronomy," or as a "part of the round globe under the
+optical sky"--we do not think of that, but the imagination is moved by
+the vast sweep of the ocean and its abysmal depths, and its ceaseless
+rocking. In some cases we see the All in the little; the law that
+spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is seen in leasts is an
+old Latin maxim. The soap bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the
+boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam engine; but a tumbler of
+water throws no light on the sea, though its sweating may help explain
+the rain.
+
+Emerson quotes Goethe as saying, "The beautiful is a manifestation of
+secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever
+concealed from us." As if beauty were an objective reality instead of
+a subjective experience! As if it were something out there in the
+landscape that you may gather your arms full of and bring in! If you
+are an artist, you may bring in your vision of it, pass it through
+your own mind, and thus embalm and preserve the beauty. Or if you are
+a poet, you may have a similar experience and reproduce it, humanized,
+in a poem. But the beauty is always a distilled and re-created, or,
+shall we say, an incarnated beauty--a tangible and measurable
+something, like moisture in the air, or sugar in the trees, or quartz
+in the rocks. There is, and can be, no "science of beauty." Beauty,
+like truth, is an experience of the mind. It is the emotion you feel
+when in health you look from your door or window of a May morning. If
+you are ill, or oppressed with grief, or worried, you will hardly
+experience the emotion of the beautiful.
+
+Emerson said he was warned by the fate of many philosophers not to
+attempt a definition of beauty. But in trying to describe it and
+characterize it he ran the same risk. "We ascribe beauty to that which
+is simple," he said; "which has no superfluous parts; which exactly
+answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean
+of many extremes." Is a boot-jack beautiful? Is a crow-bar? Yet these
+are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their
+ends, they stand related to all things through the laws of chemistry
+and physics. A flower is beautiful, a shell on the beach is beautiful,
+a tree in full leaf, or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these
+things are not very simple. Complex things may be beautiful also. A
+village church may be beautiful no less than a Gothic cathedral.
+Emerson was himself a beautiful writer, a beautiful character, and his
+works are a priceless addition to literature.
+
+"Go out of the house to see the moon," says Emerson, "and it is mere
+tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your
+necessary journey." This is not true in my experience. The stars do
+not become mere tinsel, do they, when we go out to look at the
+overwhelming spectacle? Neither does the moon. Is it not a delight in
+itself to look at the full moon--
+
+    "The vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue,"
+
+as Whitman says?
+
+    "The moon doth look round her with delight when the heavens are bare,"
+
+says Wordsworth, and equally with delight do we regard the spectacle.
+The busy farmer in the fields rarely sees the beauty of Nature. He has
+not the necessary detachment. Put him behind his team and plough in
+the spring and he makes a pleasing picture to look upon, but the mind
+must be open to take in the beauty of Nature.
+
+Of course Emerson is only emphasizing the fact of the beauty of
+utility, of the things we do, of the buildings we put up for use, and
+not merely for show. A hut, a log cabin in a clearing, a farmer's
+unpainted barn, all have elements of beauty. A man leading a horse to
+water, or foddering his cattle from a stack in a snow-covered field,
+or following his plough, is always pleasing. Every day I pass along a
+road by a wealthy man's estate and see a very elaborate stone wall of
+cobblestones and cement which marks the boundary of his estate on the
+highway. The wall does not bend and undulate with the inequalities of
+the ground; its top is as level as a foundation wall; it is an offense
+to every passer-by; it has none of the simplicity that should mark a
+division wall; it is studied and elaborate, and courts your
+admiration. How much more pleasing a rough wall of field stone, or
+"wild stone," as our old wall-layer put it, with which the farmer
+separates his fields! No thought of looks, but only of utility. The
+showy, the highly ornate castle which the multimillionaire builds on
+his estate--would an artist ever want to put one of them in his
+picture? Beauty is likely to flee when we make a dead set at her.
+
+Emerson's exaggerations are sometimes so excessive as to be simply
+amusing, as, when speaking of the feats of the imagination, he says,
+"My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors
+and constellations." The baseball, revolving as it flies, may suggest
+the orbs, or your girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your
+face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain by the soil; but
+does the blacking of your shoes suggest anything celestial? Hinges and
+levers and fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or old boots,
+have not much poetic significance. An elm tree may suggest a
+cathedral, or a shell suggest the rainbow, or the sparkling frost
+suggest diamonds, or the thread that holds the beads symbolize the law
+that strings the spheres, but a button is a button, a shoestring a
+shoestring, and a spade a spade, and nothing more.
+
+I cherish and revere the name of Emerson so profoundly, and owe him
+such a debt, that it seems, after all, a pity to point out the flaws
+in his precious amber.
+
+Let us keep alive the Emersonian memories: that such a man has lived
+and wrought among us. Let us teach our children his brave and heroic
+words, and plant our lives upon as secure an ethical foundation as he
+did. Let us make pilgrimages to Concord, and stand with uncovered
+heads beneath the pine tree where his ashes rest. He left us an estate
+in the fair land of the Ideal. He bequeathed us treasures that thieves
+cannot break through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor moth
+destroy.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: At the onset of the author's last illness he attempted to
+rearrange and improve this essay, but was even then unequal to it,
+and, after a little shifting and editing, gave it up. "Do what you can
+with it," he said; and when I asked him if he could not add a few
+words to close it, he sat up in bed, and wrote the closing sentences,
+which proved to be the last he ever penned.--C. B.]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU
+
+I
+
+
+After Emerson, the name of no New England man of letters keeps greener
+and fresher than that of Thoreau. A severe censor of his countrymen,
+and with few elements of popularity, yet the quality of his thought,
+the sincerity of his life, and the nearness and perennial interest of
+his themes, as well as his rare powers of literary expression, win
+recruits from each generation of readers. He does not grow stale any
+more than Walden Pond itself grows stale. He is an obstinate fact
+there in New England life and literature, and at the end of his first
+centennial his fame is more alive than ever.
+
+Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July, 1817, and passed
+most of his life of forty-five years in his native town, minding his
+own business, as he would say, which consisted, for the most part, in
+spending at least the half of each day in the open air, winter and
+summer, rain and shine, and in keeping tab upon all the doings of wild
+nature about him and recording his observations in his Journal.
+
+The two race strains that met in Thoreau, the Scottish and the French,
+come out strongly in his life and character. To the French he owes his
+vivacity, his lucidity, his sense of style, and his passion for the
+wild; for the French, with all their urbanity and love of art, turn to
+nature very easily. To the Scot he is indebted more for his character
+than for his intellect. From this source come his contrariness, his
+combativeness, his grudging acquiescence, and his pronounced
+mysticism. Thence also comes his genius for solitude. The man who in
+his cabin in the woods has a good deal of company "especially the
+mornings when nobody calls," is French only in the felicity of his
+expression. But there is much in Thoreau that is neither Gallic nor
+Scottish, but pure Thoreau.
+
+The most point-blank and authoritative criticism within my knowledge
+that Thoreau has received at the hands of his countrymen came from the
+pen of Lowell about 1864, and was included in "My Study Windows." It
+has all the professional smartness and scholarly qualities which
+usually characterize Lowell's critical essays. Thoreau was vulnerable,
+both as an observer and as a literary craftsman, and Lowell lets him
+off pretty easily--too easily--on both counts.
+
+The flaws he found in his nature lore were very inconsiderable: "Till
+he built his Walden shack he did not know that the hickory grew near
+Concord. Till he went to Maine he had never seen phosphorescent
+wood--a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he
+spoke of the seeding [_i. e._, flowering][3] of the pine as a new
+discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of
+blowing pollen might have earlier caught his eye."
+
+[Footnote 3: See "Walking" in _Excursions_. He was under thirty-three
+when he made these observations (June, 1850).]
+
+As regards his literary craftsmanship, Lowell charges him only with
+having revived the age of _concetti_ while he fancied himself going
+back to a preclassical nature, basing the charge on such a far-fetched
+comparison as that in which Thoreau declares his preference for "the
+dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the
+moss-beds" over the wit of the Greek sages as it comes to us in the
+"Banquet" of Xenophon--a kind of perversity of comparison all too
+frequent with Thoreau.
+
+But though Lowell lets Thoreau off easily on these specific counts, he
+more than makes up by his sweeping criticism, on more general grounds,
+of his life and character. Here one feels that he overdoes the matter.
+
+It is not true, in the sense which Lowell implies, that Thoreau's
+whole life was a search for the doctor. It was such a search in no
+other sense than that we are all in search of the doctor when we take
+a walk, or flee to the mountains or to the seashore, or seek to bring
+our minds and spirits in contact with "Nature's primal sanities." His
+search for the doctor turns out to be an escape from the conditions
+that make a doctor necessary. His wonderful activity, those long walks
+in all weathers, in all seasons, by night as well as by day, drenched
+by rain and chilled by frost, suggest a reckless kind of health. A
+doctor might wisely have cautioned him against such exposures. Nor was
+Thoreau a valetudinarian in his physical, moral, or intellectual
+fiber.
+
+It is not true, as Lowell charges, that it was his indolence that
+stood in the way of his taking part in the industrial activities in
+which his friends and neighbors engaged, or that it was his lack of
+persistence and purpose that hindered him. It is not true that he was
+poor because he looked upon money as an unmixed evil. Thoreau's
+purpose was like adamant, and his industry in his own proper pursuits
+was tireless. He knew the true value of money, and he knew also that
+the best things in life are to be had without money and without price.
+When he had need of money, he earned it. He turned his hand to many
+things--land-surveying, lecturing, magazine-writing, growing white
+beans, doing odd jobs at carpentering, whitewashing, fence-building,
+plastering, and brick-laying.
+
+Lowell's criticism amounts almost to a diatribe. He was naturally
+antagonistic to the Thoreau type of mind. Coming from a man near his
+own age, and a neighbor, Thoreau's criticism of life was an affront to
+the smug respectability and scholarly attainments of the class to
+which Lowell belonged. Thoreau went his own way, with an air of
+defiance and contempt which, no doubt, his contemporaries were more
+inclined to resent than we are at our distance. Shall this man in his
+hut on the shores of Walden Pond assume to lay down the law and the
+gospel to his elders and betters, and pass unrebuked, no matter on
+what intimate terms he claims to be with the gods of the woods and
+mountains? This seems to be Lowell's spirit.
+
+"Thoreau's experiment," says Lowell, "actually presupposed all that
+complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted
+on another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his
+bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough,
+his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the
+sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that
+such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." Very clever,
+but what of it? Of course Thoreau was a product of the civilization he
+decried. He was a product of his country and his times. He was born in
+Concord and early came under the influence of Emerson; he was a
+graduate of Harvard University and all his life availed himself, more
+or less, of the accumulated benefits of state and social
+organizations. When he took a train to Boston, or dropped a letter in,
+or received one through, the post office, or read a book, or visited a
+library, or looked in a newspaper, he was a sharer in these benefits.
+He made no claims to living independently of the rest of mankind. His
+only aim in his Walden experiment was to reduce life to its lowest
+terms, to drive it into a corner, as he said, and question and
+cross-question it, and see, if he could, what it really meant. And he
+probably came as near cornering it there in his hut on Walden Pond as
+any man ever did anywhere, certainly in a way more pleasing to
+contemplate than did the old hermits in the desert, or than did
+Diogenes in his tub, though Lowell says the tub of the old Greek had a
+sounder bottom.
+
+Lowell seemed to discredit Thoreau by attacking his philosophy and
+pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies of a man who
+abjures the civilization of which he is the product, overlooking the
+fact that man's theories and speculations may be very wide of the
+truth as we view it, and yet his life be noble and inspiring. Now
+Thoreau did not give us a philosophy, but a life. He gave us fresh and
+beautiful literature, he gave us our first and probably only nature
+classic, he gave us an example of plain living and high thinking that
+is always in season, and he took upon himself that kind of noble
+poverty that carries the suggestion of wealth of soul.
+
+No matter how much Thoreau abjured our civilization, he certainly made
+good use of the weapons it gave him. No matter whose lands he squatted
+on, or whose saw he borrowed, or to whom or what he was indebted for
+the tools and utensils that made his life at Walden possible,--these
+things were the mere accidents of his environment,--he left a record
+of his life and thoughts there which is a precious heritage to his
+countrymen. The best in his books ranks with the best in the
+literature of his times. One could wish that he had shown more
+tolerance for the things other men live for, but this must not make us
+overlook the value of the things he himself lived for, though with
+some of his readers his intolerance doubtless has this effect. We
+cannot all take to the woods and swamps as Thoreau did. He had a
+genius for that kind of a life; the most of us must stick to our farms
+and desks and shops and professions.
+
+Thoreau retired to Walden for study and contemplation, and because, as
+he said, he had a little private business with himself. He found that
+by working about six weeks in the year he could meet all his living
+expenses, and then have all his winter and most of his summers free
+and clear for study. He found that to maintain one's self on this
+earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if one will live simply and
+wisely. He said, "It is not necessary that a man should earn his
+living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do."
+Was not his experiment worth while?
+
+"Walden" is a wonderful and delightful piece of brag, but it is much
+more than that. It is literature; it is a Gospel of the Wild. It made
+a small Massachusetts pond famous, and the Mecca of many devout
+pilgrims.
+
+Lowell says that Thoreau had no humor, but there are many pages in
+"Walden" that are steeped in a quiet but most delicious humor. His
+humor brings that inward smile which is the badge of art's felicity.
+His "Bean-Field" is full of it. I venture to say that never before had
+a hermit so much fun with a field of white beans.
+
+Both by training and by temperament Lowell was disqualified from
+entering into Thoreau's character and aims. Lowell's passion for books
+and academic accomplishments was as strong as was Thoreau's passion
+for the wild and for the religion of Nature. When Lowell went to
+Nature for a theme, as in his "Good Word for Winter," his "My Garden
+Acquaintance," and the "Moosehead Journal," his use of it was mainly
+to unlock the treasures of his literary and scholarly attainments; he
+bedecked and be jeweled Nature with gems from all the literatures of
+the world. In the "Journal" we get more of the flavor of libraries
+than of the Maine woods and waters. No reader of Lowell can doubt that
+he was a nature-lover, nor can he doubt that he loved books and
+libraries more. In all his nature writings the poverty of the
+substance and the wealth of the treatment are striking. The final
+truth about Lowell's contributions is that his mind was essentially a
+prose mind, even when he writes poetry. Emerson said justly that his
+tone was always that of prose. What is his "Cathedral" but versified
+prose? Like so many cultivated men, he showed a talent for poetry, but
+not genius; as, on the other hand, one may say of Emerson that he
+showed more genius for poetry than talent, his inspiration surpassed
+his technical skill.
+
+One is not surprised when he finds that John Brown was one of
+Thoreau's heroes; he was a sort of John Brown himself in another
+sphere; but one is surprised when one finds him so heartily approving
+of Walt Whitman and traveling to Brooklyn to look upon him and hear
+his voice. He recognized at once the tremendous significance of
+Whitman and the power of his poetry. He called him the greatest
+democrat which the world had yet seen. With all his asceticism and his
+idealism, he was not troubled at all with those things in Whitman that
+are a stumbling-block to so many persons. Evidently his long
+intercourse with Nature had prepared him for the primitive and
+elemental character of Whitman's work. No doubt also his familiarity
+with the great poems and sacred books of the East helped him. At any
+rate, in this respect, his endorsement of Whitman adds greatly to our
+conception of the mental and spiritual stature of Thoreau.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I can hold my criticism in the back of my head while I say with my
+forehead that all our other nature writers seem tame and insipid
+beside Thoreau. He was so much more than a mere student and observer
+of nature; and it is this surplusage which gives the extra weight and
+value to his nature writing. He was a critic of life, he was a
+literary force that made for plain living and high thinking. His
+nature lore was an aside; he gathered it as the meditative saunterer
+gathers a leaf, or a flower, or a shell on the beach, while he ponders
+on higher things. He had other business with the gods of the woods
+than taking an inventory of their wares. He was a dreamer, an
+idealist, a fervid ethical teacher, seeking inspiration in the fields
+and woods. The hound, the turtle-dove, and the bay horse which he said
+he had lost, and for whose trail he was constantly seeking, typified
+his interest in wild nature. The natural history in his books is quite
+secondary. The natural or supernatural history of his own thought
+absorbed him more than the exact facts about the wild life around
+him. He brings us a gospel more than he brings us a history. His
+science is only the handmaid of his ethics; his wood-lore is the foil
+of his moral and intellectual teachings. His observations are
+frequently at fault, or wholly wide of the mark; but the flower or
+specimen that he brings you always "comes laden with a thought." There
+is a tang and a pungency to nearly everything he published; the
+personal quality which flavors it is like the formic acid which the
+bee infuses into the nectar he gets from the flower, and which makes
+it honey.
+
+I feel that some such statement about Thoreau should precede or go
+along with any criticism of him as a writer or as an observer. He was,
+first and last, a moral force speaking in the terms of the literary
+naturalist.
+
+Thoreau's prayer in one of his poems--that he might greatly disappoint
+his friends--seems to have been answered. While his acquaintances went
+into trade or the professions, he cast about to see what he could do
+to earn his living and still be true to the call of his genius. In his
+Journal of 1851 he says: "While formerly I was looking about to see
+what I could do for a living, some sad experiences in conforming to
+the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I
+thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I
+could do, and its small profits might suffice, so little capital is
+required, so little distraction from my wonted thoughts." He could
+range the hills in summer and still look after the flocks of King
+Admetus. He also dreamed that he might gather the wild herbs and carry
+evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods. But
+he soon learned that trade cursed everything, and that "though you
+trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to
+the business." The nearest his conscience would allow him to approach
+any kind of trade was to offer himself to his townsmen as a
+land-surveyor. This would take him to the places where he liked to be;
+he could still walk in the fields and woods and swamps and earn his
+living thereby. The chain and compass became him well, quite as well
+as his bean-field at Walden, and the little money they brought him was
+not entirely sordid.
+
+In one of his happy moods in "Walden" he sets down in a
+half-facetious, half-mystical, but wholly delightful way, his various
+avocations, such as his self-appointment as inspector of snow-storms
+and rain-storms, and surveyor of forest paths and all across-lot
+routes, and herdsman of the wild stock of the town. He is never more
+enjoyable than in such passages. His account of going into business at
+Walden Pond is in the same happy vein. As his fellow citizens were
+slow in offering him any opening in which he could earn a living, he
+turned to the woods, where he was better known, and determined to go
+into business at once without waiting to acquire the usual capital. He
+expected to open trade with the Celestial Empire, and Walden was just
+the place to start the venture. He thought his strict business habits
+acquired through years of keeping tab on wild Nature's doings, his
+winter days spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the
+wind, and his early spring mornings before his neighbors were astir to
+hear the croak of the first frog, all the training necessary to ensure
+success in business with the Celestial Empire. He admits, it is true,
+that he never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but doubted
+not that it was of the last importance only to be present at it. All
+such fooling as this is truly delightful. When he goes about his
+sylvan business with his tongue in his cheek and a quizzical,
+good-humored look upon his face in this way, and advertises the hound,
+the bay horse, and the turtle-dove he lost so long ago, he is the true
+Thoreau, and we take him to our hearts.
+
+One also enjoys the way in which he magnifies his petty occupations.
+His brag over his bean-field is delightful. He makes one want to hoe
+beans with him:
+
+     When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to
+     the woods and the sky and was an accompaniment to my labor
+     which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no
+     longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I
+     remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at
+     all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the
+     oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny
+     afternoons--for I sometimes made a day of it--like a mote in
+     the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with
+     a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at
+     last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope
+     remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on
+     the ground on bare sand or rocks on the top of hills, where
+     few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples
+     caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to
+     float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The
+     hawk is aërial brother of the wave which he sails over and
+     surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to
+     the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I
+     watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky,
+     alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving
+     one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own
+     thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons
+     from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing
+     sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe
+     turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish salamander, a
+     trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I
+     paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard
+     and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible
+     entertainment which the country offers.
+
+All this is in his best style. Who, after reading it, does not long
+for a bean-field? In planting it, too what music attends him!
+
+     Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the
+     brown thrasher--or red mavis, as some love to call him--all
+     the morning, glad of your society, that would find out
+     another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are
+     planting the seed he cries,--"Drop it, drop it,--cover it
+     up, cover it up,--pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But
+     this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as
+     he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini
+     performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with
+     your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or
+     plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had
+     entire faith.
+
+What lessons he got in botany in the hoeing!
+
+     Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes
+     with various kinds of weeds,--it will bear some iteration in
+     the account, for there was no little iteration in the
+     labor,--disturbing their delicate organizations so
+     ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his
+     hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously
+     cultivating another. That's Roman worm-wood,--that's
+     pigweed,--that's sorrel,--that's pipergrass,--have at him,
+     chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him
+     have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'
+     other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long
+     war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had
+     sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me
+     come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of
+     their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many
+     a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above
+     his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in
+     the dust.
+
+     I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when
+     the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an
+     old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to
+     have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with
+     pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new
+     eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful
+     evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even
+     without apples or cider,--a most wise and humorous friend,
+     whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever
+     did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead,
+     none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too,
+     dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in
+     whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes,
+     gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a
+     genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back
+     farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of
+     every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the
+     incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old
+     dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is
+     likely to outlive all her children yet.
+
+Thoreau taxed himself to find words and images strong enough to
+express his aversion to the lives of the men who were "engaged" in the
+various industrial fields about him. Everywhere in shops and offices
+and fields it appeared to him that his neighbors were doing penance in
+a thousand remarkable ways:
+
+     What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires
+     and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended,
+     with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the
+     heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible
+     for them to resume their natural position, while from the
+     twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the
+     stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a
+     tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the
+     breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops
+     of pillars,--even these forms of conscious penance are
+     hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which
+     I daily witness.... I see young men, my townsmen, whose
+     misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns,
+     cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily
+     acquired than got rid of.
+
+Surely this disciple of the Gospel of the Wild must have disappointed
+his friends. It was this audacious gift which Thoreau had for making
+worldly possessions seem ignoble, that gives the tang to many pages of
+his writings.
+
+Thoreau became a great traveler--in Concord, as he says--and made
+Walden Pond famous in our literature by spending two or more years in
+the woods upon its shore, and writing an account of his sojourn there
+which has become a nature classic. He was a poet-naturalist, as his
+friend Channing aptly called him, of untiring industry, and the
+country in a radius of seven or eight miles about Concord was threaded
+by him in all seasons as probably no other section of New England was
+ever threaded and scrutinized by any one man. Walking in the fields
+and woods, and recording what he saw and heard and thought in his
+Journal, became the business of his life. He went over the same ground
+endlessly, but always brought back new facts, or new impressions,
+because he was so sensitive to all the changing features of the day
+and the season in the landscape about him.
+
+Once he extended his walking as far as Quebec, Canada, and once he
+took in the whole of Cape Cod; three or four times he made excursions
+to the Maine woods, the result of which gave the name to one of his
+most characteristic volumes; but as habitually as the coming of the
+day was he a walker about Concord, in all seasons, primarily for
+companionship with untamed Nature, and secondarily as a gleaner in the
+fields of natural history.
+
+II
+
+Thoreau was not a great philosopher, he was not a great naturalist, he
+was not a great poet, but as a nature-writer and an original character
+he is unique in our literature. His philosophy begins and ends with
+himself, or is entirely subjective, and is frequently fantastic, and
+nearly always illogical. His poetry is of the oracular kind, and is
+only now and then worth attention. There are crudities in his writings
+that make the conscientious literary craftsman shudder; there are
+mistakes of observation that make the serious naturalist wonder; and
+there is often an expression of contempt for his fellow countrymen,
+and the rest of mankind, and their aims in life, that makes the
+judicious grieve. But at his best there is a gay symbolism, a felicity
+of description, and a freshness of observation that delight all
+readers.
+
+As a person he gave himself to others reluctantly; he was, in truth, a
+recluse. He stood for character more than for intellect, and for
+intuition more than for reason. He was often contrary and
+inconsistent. There was more crust than crumb in the loaf he gave us.
+
+He went about the business of living with his head in the clouds, or
+with an absolute devotion to the ideal that is certainly rare in our
+literary history. He declared that he aimed to crow like chanticleer
+in the morning, if only to wake his neighbors up. Much of his writings
+have this chanticleerian character; they are a call to wake up, to rub
+the film from one's eyes, and see the real values of life. To this end
+he prods with paradoxes, he belabors with hyperboles, he teases with
+irony, he startles with the unexpected. He finds poverty more
+attractive than riches, solitude more welcome than society, a sphagnum
+swamp more to be desired than a flowered field.
+
+Thoreau is suggestive of those antibodies which modern science makes
+so much of. He tends to fortify us against the dry rot of business,
+the seductions of social pleasures, the pride of wealth and position.
+He is antitoxic; he is a literary germicide of peculiar power. He is
+too religious to go to church, too patriotic to pay his taxes, too
+fervent a humanist to interest himself in the social welfare of his
+neighborhood.
+
+Thoreau called himself a mystic, and a transcendentalist, and a
+natural philosopher to boot. But the least of these was the natural
+philosopher. He did not have the philosophic mind, nor the scientific
+mind; he did not inquire into the reason of things, nor the meaning of
+things; in fact, had no disinterested interest in the universe apart
+from himself. He was too personal and illogical for a philosopher. The
+scientific interpretation of things did not interest him at all. He
+was interested in things only so far as they related to Henry Thoreau.
+He interpreted Nature entirely in the light of his own idiosyncrasies.
+
+Science goes its own way in spite of our likes and dislikes, but
+Thoreau's likes and dislikes determined everything for him. He was
+stoical, but not philosophical. His intellect had no free play outside
+his individual predilection. Truth as philosophers use the term, was
+not his quest but truth made in Concord.
+
+Thoreau writes that when he was once asked by the Association for the
+Advancement of Science what branch of science he was especially
+interested in, he did not reply because he did not want to make
+himself the laughing-stock of the scientific community, which did not
+believe in a science which deals with the higher law--his higher law,
+which bears the stamp of Henry Thoreau.
+
+He was an individualist of the most pronounced type. The penalty of
+this type of mind is narrowness; the advantage is the personal flavor
+imparted to the written page. Thoreau's books contain plenty of the
+pepper and salt of character and contrariness; even their savor of
+whim and prejudice adds to their literary tang. When his individualism
+becomes aggressive egotism, as often happens, it is irritating; but
+when it gives only that pungent and personal flavor which pervades
+much of "Walden," it is very welcome.
+
+Thoreau's critics justly aver that he severely arraigns his countrymen
+because they are not all Thoreaus--that they do not desert their farms
+and desks and shops and take to the woods. What unmeasured contempt he
+pours out upon the lives and ambitions of most of them! Need a
+nature-lover, it is urged, necessarily be a man-hater? Is not man a
+part of nature?--averaging up quite as good as the total scheme of
+things out of which he came? Cannot his vices and shortcomings be
+matched by a thousand cruel and abortive things in the fields and the
+woods? The fountain cannot rise above its source, and man is as good
+as is the nature out of which he came, and of which he is a part. Most
+of Thoreau's harsh judgments upon his neighbors and countrymen are
+only his extreme individualism gone to seed.
+
+An extremist he always was. Extreme views commended themselves to him
+because they were extreme. His aim in writing was usually "to make an
+extreme statement." He left the middle ground to the school committees
+and trustees. He had in him the stuff of which martyrs and heroes are
+made. In John Brown he recognized a kindred soul. But his literary
+bent led him to take his own revolutionary impulses out in words. The
+closest he came to imitation of the hero of Harper's Ferry and to
+defying the Government was on one occasion when he refused to pay his
+poll-tax and thus got himself locked in jail overnight. It all seems a
+petty and ignoble ending of his fierce denunciation of politics and
+government, but it no doubt helped to satisfy his imagination, which
+so tyrannized over him throughout life. He could endure offenses
+against his heart and conscience and reason easier than against his
+imagination.
+
+He presents that curious phenomenon of a man who is an extreme product
+of culture and civilization, and yet who so hungers and thirsts for
+the wild and the primitive that he is unfair to the forces and
+conditions out of which he came, and by which he is at all times
+nourished and upheld. He made his excursions into the Maine wilderness
+and lived in his hut by Walden Pond as a scholar and philosopher, and
+not at all in the spirit of the lumbermen and sportsmen whose wildness
+he so much admired. It was from his vantage-ground of culture and of
+Concord transcendentalism that he appraised all these types. It was
+from a community built up and sustained by the common industries and
+the love of gain that he decried all these things. It was from a town
+and a civilization that owed much to the pine tree that he launched
+his diatribe against the lumbermen in the Maine woods: "The pine is no
+more lumber than man is; and to be made into boards and houses no more
+its true and highest use than the truest use of man is to be cut down
+and made into manure." Not a happy comparison, but no matter. If the
+pine tree had not been cut down and made into lumber, it is quite
+certain that Thoreau would never have got to the Maine woods to utter
+this protest, just as it is equally certain that had he not been a
+member of a thrifty and industrious community, and kept his hold upon
+it, he could not have made his Walden experiment of toying and
+coquetting with the wild and the non-industrial. His occupations as
+land-surveyor, lyceum lecturer, and magazine writer attest how much he
+owed to the civilization he was so fond of decrying. This is Thoreau's
+weakness--the half-truths in which he plumes himself, as if they were
+the whole law and gospel. His Walden bean-field was only a pretty
+piece of play-acting; he cared more for the ringing of his hoe upon
+the stones than for the beans. Had his living really depended upon the
+product, the sound would not have pleased him so, and the botany of
+the weeds he hoed under would not have so interested him.
+
+Thoreau's half-truths titillate and amuse the mind. We do not nod over
+his page. We enjoy his art while experiencing an undercurrent of
+protest against his unfairness. We could have wished him to have shown
+himself in his writings as somewhat sweeter and more tolerant toward
+the rest of the world, broader in outlook, and more just and
+charitable in disposition--more like his great prototype, Emerson, who
+could do full justice to the wild and the spontaneous without doing an
+injustice to their opposites; who could see the beauty of the pine
+tree, yet sing the praises of the pine-tree State House; who could
+arraign the Government, yet pay his taxes; who could cherish Thoreau,
+and yet see all his limitations. Emerson affirmed more than he denied,
+and his charity was as broad as his judgment. He set Thoreau a good
+example in bragging, but he bragged to a better purpose. He exalted
+the present moment, the universal fact, the omnipotence of the moral
+law, the sacredness of private judgment; he pitted the man of to-day
+against all the saints and heroes of history; and, although he decried
+traveling, he was yet considerable of a traveler, and never tried to
+persuade himself that Concord was an epitome of the world. Emerson
+comes much nearer being a national figure than does Thoreau, and yet
+Thoreau, by reason of his very narrowness and perversity, and by his
+intense local character, united to the penetrating character of his
+genius, has made an enduring impression upon our literature.
+
+III
+
+Thoreau's life was a search for the wild. He was the great disciple of
+the Gospel of Walking. He elevated walking into a religious exercise.
+One of his most significant and entertaining chapters is on "Walking."
+No other writer that I recall has set forth the Gospel of Walking so
+eloquently and so stimulatingly. Thoreau's religion and his philosophy
+are all in this chapter. It is his most mature, his most complete and
+comprehensive statement. He says:
+
+     I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my
+     life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking
+     walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_,
+     which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who
+     roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked
+     charity, under pretence of going _à la Sainte Terre_," to
+     the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a
+     _Sainte-Terrer_,"--a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who
+     never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend,
+     are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go
+     there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean....
+     For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter
+     the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land
+     from the hands of the Infidels.
+
+Thoreau was the first man in this country, or in any other, so far as
+I know, who made a religion of walking--the first to announce a Gospel
+of the Wild. That he went forth into wild nature in much the same
+spirit that the old hermits went into the desert, and was as devout in
+his way as they were in theirs, is revealed by numerous passages in
+his Journal. He would make his life a sacrament; he discarded the old
+religious terms and ideas, and struck out new ones of his own:
+
+     What more glorious condition of being can we imagine than
+     from impure to become pure? May I not forget that I am
+     impure and vicious! May I not cease to love purity! May I go
+     to my slumbers as expecting to arise to a new and more
+     perfect day! May I so live and refine my life as fitting
+     myself for a society ever higher than I actually enjoy!
+
+     To watch for and describe all the divine features which I
+     detect in nature! My profession is to be always on the alert
+     to find God in nature, to know his lurking-place, to attend
+     all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.
+
+     Ah! I would walk, I would sit, and sleep, with natural
+     piety. What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went
+     along the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds? For
+     joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried
+     in it.
+
+     I do not deserve anything. I am unworthy the least regard,
+     and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and
+     yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are
+     prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. But I
+     cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to
+     the human friends I have.
+
+In the essay on "Walking," Thoreau says that the art of walking "comes
+only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
+Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
+Walkers." "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,
+unless I spend four hours a day at least,--it is commonly more than
+that,--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
+absolutely free from all worldly engagements."
+
+Thoreau made good his boast. He was a new kind of walker, a
+Holy-Lander. His walks yielded him mainly spiritual and ideal results.
+The fourteen published volumes of his Journal are mainly a record of
+his mental reactions to the passing seasons and to the landscape he
+sauntered through. There is a modicum of natural history, but mostly
+he reaps the intangible harvest of the poet, the saunterer, the
+mystic, the super-sportsman.
+
+With his usual love of paradox Thoreau says that the fastest way to
+travel is to go afoot, because, one may add, the walker is constantly
+arriving at his destination; all places are alike to him, his harvest
+grows all along the road and beside every path, in every field and
+wood and on every hilltop.
+
+All of Thoreau's books belong to the literature of Walking, and are as
+true in spirit in Paris or London as in Concord. His natural history,
+for which he had a passion, is the natural history of the walker, not
+always accurate, as I have pointed out, but always graphic and
+interesting.
+
+Wordsworth was about the first poet-walker--a man of letters who made
+a business of walking, and whose study was really the open air. But he
+was not a Holy-Lander in the Thoreau sense. He did not walk to get
+away from people as Thoreau did, but to see a greater variety of them,
+and to gather suggestions for his poems. Not so much the wild as the
+human and the morally significant were the objects of Wordsworth's
+quest. He haunted waterfalls and fells and rocky heights and lonely
+tarns, but he was not averse to footpaths and highways, and the
+rustic, half-domesticated nature of rural England. He was a
+nature-lover; he even calls himself a nature-worshiper; and he appears
+to have walked as many, or more, hours each day, in all seasons, as
+did Thoreau; but he was hunting for no lost paradise of the wild; nor
+waging a war against the arts and customs of civilization. Man and
+life were at the bottom of his interest in Nature.
+
+Wordsworth never knew the wild as we know it in this country--the
+pitilessly savage and rebellious; and, on the other hand, he never
+knew the wonderfully delicate and furtive and elusive nature that we
+know; but he knew the sylvan, the pastoral, the rustic-human, as we
+cannot know them. British birds have nothing plaintive in their
+songs; and British woods and fells but little that is disorderly and
+cruel in their expression, or violent in their contrasts.
+
+Wordsworth gathered his finest poetic harvest from common nature and
+common humanity about him--the wayside birds and flowers and
+waterfalls, and the wayside people. Though he called himself a
+worshiper of Nature, it was Nature in her half-human moods that he
+adored--Nature that knows no extremes, and that has long been under
+the influence of man--a soft, humid, fertile, docile Nature, that
+suggests a domesticity as old and as permanent as that of cattle and
+sheep. His poetry reflects these features, reflects the high moral and
+historic significance of the European landscape, while the poetry of
+Emerson, and of Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness of
+our more capricious and unkempt Nature.
+
+The walker has no axe to grind; he sniffs the air for new adventure;
+he loiters in old scenes, he gleans in old fields. He only seeks
+intimacy with Nature to surprise her preoccupied with her own affairs.
+He seeks her in the woods, the swamps, on the hills, along the
+streams, by night and by day, in season and out of season. He skims
+the fields and hillsides as the swallow skims the air, and what he
+gets is intangible to most persons. He sees much with his eyes, but he
+sees more with his heart and imagination. He bathes in Nature as in a
+sea. He is alert for the beauty that waves in the trees, that ripples
+in the grass and grain, that flows in the streams, that drifts in the
+clouds, that sparkles in the dew and rain. The hammer of the
+geologist, the notebook of the naturalist, the box of the herbalist,
+the net of the entomologist, are not for him. He drives no sharp
+bargains with Nature, he reads no sermons in stones, no books in
+running brooks, but he does see good in everything. The book he reads
+he reads through all his senses--through his eyes, his ears, his nose,
+and also through his feet and hands--and its pages are open
+everywhere; the rocks speak of more than geology to him, the birds of
+more than ornithology, the flowers of more than botany, the stars of
+more than astronomy, the wild creatures of more than zoölogy.
+
+The average walker is out for exercise and the exhilarations of the
+road, he reaps health and strength; but Thoreau evidently impaired his
+health by his needless exposure and inadequate food. He was a
+Holy-Lander who falls and dies in the Holy Land. He ridiculed walking
+for exercise--taking a walk as the sick take medicine; the walk itself
+was to be the "enterprise and adventure of the day." And "you must
+walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates
+while walking."
+
+IV
+
+Thoreau's friends and neighbors seem to have persuaded themselves that
+his natural-history lore was infallible, and, moreover, that he
+possessed some mysterious power over the wild creatures about him that
+other men did not possess. I recall how Emerson fairly bristled up
+when on one occasion while in conversation with him I told him I
+thought Thoreau in his trips to the Maine woods had confounded the
+hermit thrush with the wood thrush, as the latter was rarely or never
+found in Maine. As for Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures,
+Emerson voiced this superstition when he said, "Snakes coiled round
+his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them from the
+water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took
+the foxes under his protection from the hunters." Of course Thoreau
+could do nothing with the wild creatures that you or I could not do
+under the same conditions. A snake will coil around any man's leg if
+he steps on its tail, but it will not be an embrace of affection; and
+a fish will swim into his hands under the same conditions that it will
+into Thoreau's. As for pulling a woodchuck out of its hole by the
+tail, the only trouble is to get hold of the tail. The 'chuck is
+pretty careful to keep his tail behind him, but many a farm boy, aided
+by his dog, has pulled one out of the stone wall by the tail, much
+against the 'chuck's will. If Thoreau's friends were to claim that he
+could carry _Mephitis mephitica_ by the tail with impunity, I can say
+I have done the same thing, and had my photograph taken in the act.
+The skunk is no respecter of persons, and here again the trouble is to
+get hold of the tail at the right moment--and, I may add, to let go of
+it at the right moment.
+
+Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures is what every man
+possesses who is alike gentle in his approach to them. Bradford Torrey
+succeeded, after a few experiments, in so dispelling the fears of an
+incubating red-eyed vireo that she would take insect food from his
+hand, and I have known several persons to become so familiar with the
+chickadees that they would feed from the hand, and in some instances
+even take food from between the lips. If you have a chipmunk for a
+neighbor, you may soon become on such intimate terms with him that he
+will search your pockets for nuts and sit on your knee and shoulder
+and eat them. But why keep alive and circulate as truth these animal
+legends of the prescientific ages?
+
+Thoreau was not a born naturalist, but a born supernaturalist. He was
+too intent upon the bird behind the bird always to take careful note
+of the bird itself. He notes the birds, but not too closely. He was at
+times a little too careless in this respect to be a safe guide to the
+bird-student. Even the saunterer to the Holy Land ought to know the
+indigo bunting from the black-throated blue warbler, with its languid,
+midsummery, "Zee, zee, zee-eu."
+
+Many of his most interesting natural-history notes Thoreau got from
+his farmer friends--Melvin, Minott, Miles, Hubbard, Wheeler. Their
+eyes were more single to the life around them than were his; none of
+them had lost a hound, a turtle-dove, and a bay horse, whose trail
+they were daily in quest of.
+
+A haunter of swamps and river marshes all his life, he had never yet
+observed how the night bittern made its booming or pumping sound, but
+accepted the explanation of one of his neighbors that it was produced
+by the bird thrusting its bill in water, sucking up as much as it
+could hold, and then pumping it out again with four or five heaves of
+the neck, throwing the water two or three feet--in fact, turning
+itself into a veritable pump! I have stood within a few yards of the
+bird when it made the sound, and seen the convulsive movement of the
+neck and body, and the lifting of the head as the sound escaped. The
+bird seems literally to vomit up its notes, but it does not likewise
+emit water.
+
+Every farmer and fox-hunter would smile if he read Thoreau's
+statement, made in his paper on the natural history of Massachusetts,
+that "when the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep, you
+may give chase and come up with the fox on foot." Evidently Thoreau
+had never tried it. With a foot and a half, or two feet of snow on the
+ground, and traveling on snowshoes, you might force a fox to take to
+his hole, but you would not come up to him. In four or five feet of
+soft snow hunters come up with the deer, and ride on their backs for
+amusement, but I doubt if a red fox ever ventures out in such a depth
+of snow. In one of his May walks in 1860, Thoreau sees the trail of
+the musquash in the mud along the river-bottoms, and he is taken by
+the fancy that, as our roads and city streets often follow the early
+tracks of the cow, so "rivers in another period follow the trail of
+the musquash." As if the river was not there before the musquash was!
+
+Again, his mysterious "night warbler," to which he so often alludes,
+was one of our common everyday birds which most school-children know,
+namely, the oven-bird, or wood-accentor, yet to Thoreau it was a sort
+of phantom bird upon which his imagination loved to dwell. Emerson
+told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should
+have nothing more to show him. But how such a haunter of woods escaped
+identifying the bird is a puzzle.
+
+In his walks in the Maine woods Thoreau failed to discriminate the
+song of the hermit thrush from that of the wood thrush. The melody,
+no doubt, went to his heart, and that was enough. Though he sauntered
+through orchards and rested under apple trees, he never observed that
+the rings of small holes in the bark were usually made by the
+yellow-bellied woodpecker, instead of by Downy, and that the bird was
+not searching for grubs or insects, but was feeding upon the milky
+cambium layer of the inner bark.
+
+But Thoreau's little slips of the kind I have called attention to
+count as nothing against the rich harvest of natural-history notes
+with which his work abounds. He could describe bird-songs and animal
+behavior and give these things their right emphasis in the life of the
+landscape as no other New England writer has done. His account of the
+battle of the ants in Walden atones an hundred-fold for the lapses I
+have mentioned.
+
+One wonders just what Thoreau means when he says in "Walden," in
+telling of his visit to "Baker Farm": "Once it chanced that I stood in
+the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum
+of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling
+me as if I looked through colored crystal." Is it possible, then, to
+reach the end of the rainbow? Why did he not dig for the pot of gold
+that is buried there? How he could be aware that he was standing at
+the foot of one leg of the glowing arch is to me a mystery. When I
+see a rainbow, it is always immediately in front of me. I am standing
+exactly between the highest point of the arch and the sun, and the
+laws of optics ordain that it can be seen in no other way. You can
+never see a rainbow at an angle. It always faces you squarely. Hence
+no two persons see exactly the same bow, because no two persons can
+occupy exactly the same place at the same time. The bow you see is
+directed to you alone. Move to the right or the left, and it moves as
+fast as you do. You cannot flank it or reach its end. It is about the
+most subtle and significant phenomenon that everyday Nature presents
+to us. Unapproachable as a spirit, like a visitant from another world,
+yet the creation of the familiar sun and rain!
+
+How Thoreau found himself standing in the bow's abutment will always
+remain a puzzle to me. Observers standing on high mountains with the
+sun low in the west have seen the bow as a complete circle. This one
+can understand.
+
+We can point many a moral and adorn many a tale with Thoreau's
+shortcomings and failures in his treatment of nature themes. Channing
+quotes him as saying that sometimes "you must see with the inside of
+your eye." I think that Thoreau saw, or tried to see, with the inside
+of his eye too often. He does not always see correctly, and many times
+he sees more of Thoreau than he does of the nature he assumes to be
+looking at. Truly it is "needless to travel for wonders," but the
+wonderful is not one with the fantastic or the far-fetched. Forcible
+expression, as I have said, was his ruling passion as a writer. Only
+when he is free from its thrall, which in his best moments he surely
+is, does he write well. When he can forget Thoreau and remember only
+nature, we get those delightful descriptions and reflections in
+"Walden." When he goes to the Maine woods or to Cape Cod or to Canada,
+he leaves all his fantastic rhetoric behind him and gives us sane and
+refreshing books. In his walks with Channing one suspects he often let
+himself go to all lengths, did his best to turn the world inside out,
+as he did at times in his Journals, for his own edification and that
+of his wondering disciple.
+
+To see analogies and resemblances everywhere is the gift of genius,
+but to see a resemblance to volcanoes in the hubs or gnarls on birch
+or beech trees, or cathedral windows in the dead leaves of the
+andromeda in January, or a suggestion of Teneriffe in a stone-heap,
+does not indicate genius. To see the great in the little, or the whole
+of Nature in any of her parts, is the poet's gift, but to ask, after
+seeing the andropogon grass, "Are there no purple reflections from the
+culms of thought in my mind?"--a remark which Channing quotes as very
+significant--is not to be poetical. Thoreau is full of these
+impossible and fantastic comparisons, thinking only of striking
+expressions and not at all about the truth. "The flowing of the sap
+under the dull rind of the trees" is suggestive, but what suggestion
+is there in the remark, "May I ever be in as good spirits as a
+willow"? The mood of the scrub oak was more habitual with him.
+
+Thoreau was in no sense an interpreter of nature; he did not draw out
+its meanings or seize upon and develop its more significant phases.
+Seldom does he relate what he sees or thinks to the universal human
+heart and mind. He has rare power of description, but is very limited
+in his power to translate the facts and movements of nature into human
+emotion. His passage on the northern lights, which Channing quotes
+from the Journals, is a good sample of his failure in this respect:
+
+     Now the fire in the north increases wonderfully, not
+     shooting up so much as creeping along, like a fire on the
+     mountains of the north seen afar in the night. The
+     Hyperborean gods are burning brush, and it spread, and all
+     the hoes in heaven couldn't stop it. It spread from west to
+     east over the crescent hill. Like a vast fiery worm it lay
+     across the northern sky, broken into many pieces; and each
+     piece, with rainbow colors skirting it, strove to advance
+     itself toward the east, worm-like, on its own annular
+     muscles. It has spread into their choicest wood-lots. Now it
+     shoots up like a single solitary watch-fire or burning bush,
+     or where it ran up a pine tree like powder, and still it
+     continues to gleam here and there like a fat stump in the
+     burning, and is reflected in the water. And now I see the
+     gods by great exertions have got it under, and the stars
+     have come out without fear, in peace.
+
+I get no impression of the mysterious almost supernatural character of
+the aurora from such a description in terms of a burning wood-lot or a
+hay-stack; it is no more like a conflagration than an apparition is
+like solid flesh and blood. Its wonderful, I almost said its
+spiritual, beauty, its sudden vanishings and returnings, its spectral,
+evanescent character--why, it startles and awes one as if it were the
+draperies around the throne of the Eternal. And then his mixed
+metaphor--the Hyperborean gods turned farmers and busy at burning
+brush, then a fiery worm, and then the burning wood-lots! But this is
+Thoreau--inspired with the heavenly elixir one moment, and drunk with
+the brew in his own cellar the next.
+
+V
+
+Thoreau's faults as a writer are as obvious as his merits. Emerson hit
+upon one of them when he said, "The trick of his rhetoric is soon
+learned; it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought,
+its diametrical antagonist." He praises wild mountains and winter
+forests for their domestic air, snow and ice for their warmth, and so
+on. (Yet Emerson in one of his poems makes frost burn and fire
+freeze.) One frequently comes upon such sentences as these: "If I were
+sadder, I should be happier"; "The longer I have forgotten you, the
+more I remember you." It may give a moment's pleasure when a writer
+takes two opposites and rubs their ears together in that way, but one
+may easily get too much of it. Words really mean nothing when used in
+such a manner. When Emerson told Channing that if he (Emerson) could
+write as well as he did, he would write a great deal better, one
+readily sees what he means. And when Thoreau says of one of his
+callers, "I like his looks and the sound of his silence," the
+contradiction pleases one. But when he tells his friend that hate is
+the substratum of his love for him, words seem to have lost their
+meaning. Now and then he is guilty of sheer bragging, as when he says,
+"I would not go around the corner to see the world blow up."
+
+He often defies all our sense of fitness and proportion by the degree
+in which he magnifies the little and belittles the big. He says of the
+singing of a cricket which he heard under the border of some rock on
+the hillside one mid-May day, that it "makes the finest singing of
+birds outward and insignificant." "It is not so wildly melodious, but
+it is wiser and more mature than that of the wood thrush." His forced
+and meaningless analogies come out in such a comparison as this: "Most
+poems, like the fruits, are sweetest toward the blossom end." Which
+_is_ the blossom end of a poem?
+
+Thoreau advised one of his correspondents when he made garden to plant
+some Giant Regrets--they were good for sauce. It is certain that he
+himself planted some Giant Exaggerations and had a good yield. His
+exaggeration was deliberate. "Walden" is from first to last a most
+delightful sample of his talent. He belittles everything that goes on
+in the world outside his bean-field. Business, politics, institutions,
+governments, wars and rumors of wars, were not so much to him as the
+humming of a mosquito in his hut at Walden: "I am as much affected by
+the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour
+through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door
+and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.
+It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air,
+singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical
+about it." One wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly buzzing
+on the pane.
+
+He made Walden Pond famous because he made it the center of the
+universe and found life rich and full without many of the things that
+others deem necessary. There is a stream of pilgrims to Walden at all
+seasons, curious to see where so much came out of so little--where a
+man had lived who preferred poverty to riches, and solitude to
+society, who boasted that he could do without the post office, the
+newspapers, the telegraph, and who had little use for the railroad,
+though he thought mankind had become a little more punctual since its
+invention.
+
+Another conspicuous fault as a writer is his frequent use of false
+analogies, or his comparison of things which have no ground of
+relationship, as when he says: "A day passed in the society of those
+Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not
+be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines, and the
+fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." The word "wit" has no meaning when
+thus used. Or again where he says: "All great enterprises are
+self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his
+poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it
+makes." Was there ever a more inept and untruthful comparison? To find
+any ground of comparison between the two things he compared, he must
+make his poet sustain his body by the scraps and lines of his poem
+which he rejects, or else the steam planing-mill consume its finished
+product.
+
+"Let all things give way to the impulse of expression," he says, and
+he assuredly practiced what he had preached.
+
+One of his tricks of self-justification was to compare himself with
+inanimate objects, which is usually as inept as to compare colors with
+sounds or perfumes: "My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too
+cold," he writes, "but each thing is warm enough of its kind. Is the
+stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and does not
+part with it during the night? Crystals, though they be of ice are not
+too cold to melt.... Crystal does not complain of crystal any more
+than the dove of its mate."
+
+He strikes the same false note when, in discussing the question of
+solitude at Walden he compares himself to the wild animals around him,
+and to inanimate objects, and says he was no more lonely than the
+loons on the pond, or than Walden itself: "I am no more lonely than a
+single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel,
+or a house-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill
+Brook, or a weather-cock, or the North Star, or the South Wind, or an
+April Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in a new house."
+Did he imagine that any of these things were ever lonely? Man does get
+lonely, but Mill Brook and the North Star probably do not.
+
+If he sees anything unusual in nature, like galls on trees and plants,
+he must needs draw some moral from it, usually at the expense of the
+truth. For instance, he implies that the beauty of the oak galls is
+something that was meant to bloom in the flower, that the galls are
+the scarlet sins of the tree, the tree's Ode to Dejection, yet he
+must have known that they are the work of an insect and are as healthy
+a growth as is the regular leaf. The insect gives the magical touch
+that transforms the leaf into a nursery for its young. Why deceive
+ourselves by believing that fiction is more interesting than fact? But
+Thoreau is full of this sort of thing; he must have his analogy, true
+or false.
+
+He says that when a certain philosophical neighbor came to visit him
+in his hut at Walden, their discourse expanded and racked the little
+house: "I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was
+above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its
+seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to
+stop the consequent leak--but I had enough of that kind of oakum
+already picked." At the beginning of the paragraph he says that he and
+his philosopher sat down each with "some shingles of thoughts well
+dried," which they whittled, trying their knives and admiring the
+clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. In a twinkling the three
+shingles of thought are transformed into fishes of thought in a stream
+into which the hermit and the philosopher gently and reverently wade,
+without scaring or disturbing them. Then, presto! the fish become a
+force, like the pressure of a tornado that nearly wrecks his cabin!
+Surely this is tipsy rhetoric, and the work that can stand much of
+it, as "Walden" does, has a plus vitality that is rarely equaled.
+
+VI
+
+In "Walden" Thoreau, in playfully naming his various occupations,
+says, "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
+circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of
+my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my
+labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own
+reward." If he were to come back now, he would, I think, open his eyes
+in astonishment, perhaps with irritation, to see the whole bulk of
+them at last in print.
+
+His Journal was the repository of all his writings, and was drawn upon
+during his lifetime for all the material he printed in books and
+contributed to the magazines. The fourteen volumes, I venture to say,
+form a record of the most minute and painstaking details of what one
+man saw and heard on his walks in field and wood, in a single
+township, that can be found in any literature.
+
+It seems as though a man who keeps a Journal soon becomes its victim;
+at least that seems to have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for
+that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it was like a hungry,
+omnivorous monster that constantly called for more. He transcribed to
+its pages from the books he read, he filled it with interminable
+accounts of the commonplace things he saw in his walks, tedious and
+minute descriptions of everything in wood, field, and swamp. There are
+whole pages of the Latin names of the common weeds and flowers. Often
+he could not wait till he got home to write out his notes. He walked
+by day and night, in cold and heat, in storm and sunshine, all for his
+Journal. All was fish that came to that net; nothing was too
+insignificant to go in. He did not stop to make literature of it, or
+did not try, and it is rarely the raw material of literature. Its
+human interest is slight, its natural history interest slight also.
+For upwards of twenty-five years Thoreau seemed to have lived for this
+Journal. It swelled to many volumes. It is a drag-net that nothing
+escapes. The general reader reads Thoreau's Journal as he does the
+book of Nature, just to cull out the significant things here and
+there. The vast mass of the matter is merely negative, like the things
+that we disregard in our walk. Here and there we see a flower, or a
+tree, or a prospect, or a bird, that arrests attention, but how much
+we pass by or over without giving it a thought! And yet, just as the
+real nature-lover will scan eagerly the fine print in Nature's book,
+so will the student and enthusiast of Thoreau welcome all that is
+recorded in his Journals.
+
+Thoreau says that Channing in their walks together sometimes took out
+his notebook and tried to write as he did, but all in vain. "He soon
+puts it up again, or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of
+the landscape. Observing me still scribbling, he will say that he
+confines himself to the ideal, purely ideal remarks; he leaves the
+facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say, a little petulantly, 'I am
+universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite.'"
+The truth was Channing had no Journal calling, "More, more!" and was
+not so inordinately fond of composition. "I, too," says Thoreau,
+"would fain set down something beside facts. Facts should only be as
+the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology
+which I am writing." But only rarely are his facts significant, or
+capable of an ideal interpretation. Felicitous strokes like that in
+which he says, "No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep
+as the birch," are rare.
+
+Thoreau evidently had a certain companionship with his Journal. It was
+like a home-staying body to whom he told everything on his return from
+a walk. He loved to write it up. He made notes of his observations as
+he went along, night or day. One time he forgot his notebook and so
+substituted a piece of birch-bark. He must bring back something
+gathered on the spot. He skimmed the same country over and over; the
+cream he was after rose every day and all day, and in all seasons.
+
+He evidently loved to see the pages of his Journal sprinkled with the
+Latin names of the plants and animals that he saw in his walk. A
+common weed with a long Latin name acquired new dignity. Occasionally
+he fills whole pages with the scientific names of the common trees and
+plants. He loved also a sprinkling of Latin quotations and allusions
+to old and little known authors. The pride of scholarship was strong
+in him. Suggestions from what we call the heathen world seemed to
+accord with his Gospel of the Wild.
+
+Thoreau loved to write as well as John Muir loved to talk. It was his
+ruling passion. He said time never passed so quickly as when he was
+writing. It seemed as if the clock had been set back. He evidently
+went to Walden for subject-matter for his pen; and the remarkable
+thing about it all is that he was always keyed up to the writing
+pitch. The fever of expression was always upon him. Day and night,
+winter and summer, it raged in his blood. He paused in his walks and
+wrote elaborately. The writing of his Journal must have taken as much
+time as his walking.
+
+Only Thoreau's constant and unquenchable thirst for intellectual
+activity, and to supply material for that all-devouring Journal, can,
+to me, account for his main occupation during the greater part of the
+last two years of his life, which consisted in traversing the woods
+and measuring the trees and stumps and counting their rings.
+Apparently not a stump escaped him--pine, oak, birch, chestnut, maple,
+old or new, in the pasture or in the woods; he must take its measure
+and know its age. He must get the girth of every tree he passed and
+some hint of all the local conditions that had influenced its growth.
+Over two hundred pages of his Journal are taken up with barren details
+of this kind. He cross-questions the stumps and trees as if searching
+for the clue to some important problem, but no such problem is
+disclosed. He ends where he begins. His vast mass of facts and figures
+was incapable of being generalized or systematized. His elaborate
+tables of figures, so carefully arranged, absolutely accurate, no
+doubt, are void of interest, because no valuable inferences can be
+drawn from them.
+
+"I have measured in all eight pitch pine stumps at the Tommy Wheeler
+hollow, sawed off within a foot of the ground. I measured the longest
+diameter and then at right angles with that, and took the average, and
+then selected the side of the stump on which the radius was of average
+length, and counted the number of rings in each inch, beginning at the
+center, thus:" And then follows a table of figures filling a page. "Of
+those eight, average growth about one seventh of an inch per year.
+Calling the smallest number of rings in an inch in each tree one, the
+comparative slowness of growth of the inches is thus expressed." Then
+follows another carefully prepared table of figures. Before one is
+done with these pages one fairly suspects the writer is mad, the
+results are so useless, and so utterly fail to add to our knowledge of
+the woods. Would counting the leaves and branches in the forest, and
+making a pattern of each, and tabulating the whole mass of figures be
+any addition to our knowledge? I attribute the whole procedure, as I
+have said, to his uncontrollable intellectual activity, and the
+imaginary demands of this Journal, which continued to the end of his
+life. The very last pages of his Journal, a year previous to his
+death, are filled with minute accounts of the ordinary behavior of
+kittens, not one item novel or unusual, or throwing any light on the
+kitten. But it kept his mind busy, and added a page or two to the
+Journal.
+
+In his winter walks he usually carried a four-foot stick, marked in
+inches, and would measure the depth of the snow over large areas,
+every tenth step, and then construct pages of elaborate tables showing
+the variations according to locality, and then work out the
+average--an abnormal craving for exact but useless facts. Thirty-four
+measurements on Walden disclosed the important fact that the snow
+averaged five and one sixth inches deep. He analyzes a pensile nest
+which he found in the woods--doubtless one of the vireo's--and fills
+ten pages with a minute description of the different materials which
+it contained. Then he analyzes a yellow-bird's nest, filling two
+pages. That Journal shall not go hungry, even if there is nothing to
+give it but the dry material of a bird's nest.
+
+VII
+
+The craving for literary expression in Thoreau was strong and
+constant, but, as he confesses, he could not always select a theme. "I
+am prepared not so much for contemplation as for forceful expression."
+No matter what the occasion, "forceful expression" was the aim. No
+meditation, or thinking, but sallies of the mind. All his paradoxes
+and false analogies and inconsistencies come from this craving for a
+forceful expression. He apparently brought to bear all the skill he
+possessed of this kind on all occasions. One must regard him, not as a
+great thinker, nor as a disinterested seeker after the truth, but as a
+master in the art of vigorous and picturesque expression. To startle,
+to wake up, to communicate to his reader a little wholesome shock, is
+his aim. Not the novelty and freshness of his subject-matter concerns
+him but the novelty and unhackneyed character of his literary style.
+That throughout the years a man should keep up the habit of walking,
+by night as well as by day, and bring such constant intellectual
+pressure to bear upon everything he saw, or heard, or felt, is
+remarkable. No evidence of relaxation, or of abandonment to the mere
+pleasure of the light and air and of green things growing, or of
+sauntering without thoughts of his Journal. He is as keyed up and
+strenuous in his commerce with the Celestial Empire as any tradesman
+in world goods that ever amassed a fortune. He sometimes wrote as he
+walked, and expanded and elaborated the same as in his study. On one
+occasion he dropped his pencil and could not find it, but he managed
+to complete the record. One night on his way to Conantum he speculates
+for nearly ten printed pages on the secret of being able to state a
+fact simply and adequately, or of making one's self the free organ of
+truth--a subtle and ingenious discussion with the habitual craving for
+forceful expression. In vain I try to put myself in the place of a man
+who goes forth into wild nature with malice prepense to give free
+swing to his passion for forcible expression. I suppose all
+nature-writers go forth on their walks or strolls to the fields and
+woods with minds open to all of Nature's genial influences and
+significant facts and incidents, but rarely, I think, with the
+strenuousness of Thoreau--grinding the grist as they go along.
+
+Thoreau compares himself to the bee that goes forth in quest of honey
+for the hive: "How to extract honey from the flower of the world. That
+is my everyday business. I am as busy as the bee about it. I ramble
+over all fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel
+myself heavy with honey and wax." To get material for his Journal was
+as much his business as it was the bee's to get honey for his comb. He
+apparently did not know that the bee does not get honey nor wax
+directly from the flowers, but only nectar, or sweet water. The bee,
+as I have often said, makes the honey and the wax after she gets home
+to the swarm. She puts the nectar through a process of her own, adds a
+drop of her own secretion to it, namely, formic acid, the water
+evaporates, and lo! the tang and pungency of honey!
+
+VIII
+
+There can be little doubt that in his practical daily life we may credit
+Thoreau with the friendliness and neighborliness that his friend Dr.
+Edward W. Emerson claims for him. In a recent letter to me, Dr. Emerson
+writes: "He carried the old New England undemonstrativeness very far. He
+was also, I believe, really shy, prospered only in monologue, except in
+a walk in the woods with one companion, and his difficulties increased
+to impossibility in a room full of people." Dr. Emerson admits that
+Thoreau is himself to blame for giving his readers the impression that
+he held his kind in contempt, but says that in reality he had
+neighborliness, was dutiful to parents and sisters, showed courtesy to
+women and children and an open, friendly side to many a simple,
+uncultivated townsman.
+
+This practical helpfulness and friendliness in Thoreau's case seems to
+go along with the secret contempt he felt and expressed in his Journal
+toward his fellow townsmen. At one time he was chosen among the
+selectmen to perambulate the town lines--an old annual custom. One day
+they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the
+next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a
+week. Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. "A fatal coarseness is the
+result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been
+associating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I
+feel inexpressibly begrimed." How fragile his self-respect was! Yet he
+had friends among the surrounding farmers, whose society and
+conversation he greatly valued.
+
+That Thoreau gave the impression of being what country folk call a
+crusty person--curt and forbidding in manner--seems pretty well
+established. His friend Alcott says he was deficient in the human
+sentiments. Emerson, who, on the whole, loved and admired him, says:
+"Thoreau sometimes appears only as a _gendarme_, good to knock down a
+cockney with, but without that power to cheer and establish which
+makes the value of a friend." Again he says: "If I knew only Thoreau,
+I should think coöperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk
+for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
+Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the
+higher gifts,--the insight of the real, or from the real, and the
+moral rectitude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources
+of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after
+year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some
+weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper
+wasted." "It is curious," he again says, "that Thoreau goes to a house
+to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers
+it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any
+of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it,
+and when he has finished his report departs with precipitation."
+
+It is interesting in this connection to put along-side of these rather
+caustic criticisms a remark in kind recorded by Thoreau in his Journal
+concerning Emerson: "Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my
+time--nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where
+there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind--told me what I
+knew--and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to
+oppose him."
+
+Evidently Concord philosophers were not always in concord.
+
+More characteristic of Emerson is the incident Thoreau relates of his
+driving his own calf, which had just come in with the cows, out of the
+yard, thinking it belonged to a drove that was then going by. From all
+accounts Emerson was as slow to recognize his own thoughts when Alcott
+and Channing aired them before him as he was to recognize his own
+calf.
+
+"I have got a load of great hardwood stumps," writes Thoreau, and
+then, as though following out a thought suggested by them, he adds:
+"For sympathy with my neighbors I might about as well live in China.
+They are to me barbarians with their committee works and
+gregariousness."
+
+Probably the stumps were from trees that grew on his neighbors' farms
+and were a gift to him. Let us hope the farmers did not deliver them
+to him free of charge. He complained that the thousand and one
+gentlemen that he met were all alike; he was not cheered by the hope
+of any rudeness from them: "A cross man, a coarse man, an eccentric
+man, a silent man who does not drill well--of him there is some hope,"
+he declares. Herein we get a glimpse of the Thoreau ideal which led
+his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked the human sentiment. He
+may or may not have been a "cross man," but he certainly did not
+"drill well," for which his readers have reason to be thankful.
+Although Thoreau upholds the cross and the coarse man, one would
+really like to know with what grace he would have put up with
+gratuitous discourtesy or insult. I remember an entry in his Journal
+in which he tells of feeling a little cheapened when a neighbor asked
+him to take some handbills and leave them at a certain place as he
+passed on his walk.
+
+A great deal of the piquancy and novelty in Thoreau come from the
+unexpected turn he gives to things, upsetting all our preconceived
+notions. His trick of exaggeration he rather brags of: "Expect no
+trivial truth from me," he says, "unless I am on the witness stand."
+He even exaggerates his own tendency to exaggeration. It is all a part
+of his scheme to startle and wake people up. He exaggerates his likes,
+and he exaggerates his dislikes, and he exaggerates his indifference.
+It is a way he has of bragging. The moment he puts pen to paper the
+imp of exaggeration seizes it. He lived to see the beginning of the
+Civil War, and in a letter to a friend expressed his indifference in
+regard to Fort Sumter and "Old Abe," and all that, yet Mr. Sanborn
+says he was as zealous about the war as any soldier. The John Brown
+tragedy made him sick, and the war so worked upon his feelings that in
+his failing state of health he said he could never get well while it
+lasted. His passion for Nature and the wild carried him to the extent
+of looking with suspicion, if not with positive dislike, upon all of
+man's doings and institutions. All civil and political and social
+organizations received scant justice at his hands. He instantly
+espoused the cause of John Brown and championed him in the most public
+manner because he (Brown) defied the iniquitous laws and fell a martyr
+to the cause of justice and right. If he had lived in our times, one
+would have expected him, in his letters to friends, to pooh-pooh the
+World War that has drenched Europe with blood, while in his heart he
+would probably have been as deeply moved about it as any of us were.
+
+Thoreau must be a stoic, he must be an egotist, he must be illogical,
+whenever he puts pen to paper. This does not mean that he was a
+hypocrite, but it means that on his practical human side he did not
+differ so much from the rest of us, but that in his mental and
+spiritual life he pursued ideal ends with a seriousness that few of us
+are equal to. He loved to take an air-line. In his trips about the
+country to visit distant parts, he usually took the roads and paths or
+means of conveyance that other persons took, but now and then he
+would lay down his ruler on the map, draw a straight line to the
+point he proposed to visit, and follow that, going through the meadows
+and gardens and door-yards of the owners of the property in his line
+of march. There is a tradition that he and Channing once went through
+a house where the front and back door stood open. In his mental
+flights and excursions he follows this plan almost entirely; the hard
+facts and experiences of life trouble him very little. He can always
+ignore them or sail serenely above them.
+
+How is one to reconcile such an expression as this with what his
+friends report of his actual life: "My countrymen are to me
+foreigners. I have but little more sympathy with them than with the
+mobs of India or China"? Or this about his Concord neighbors, as he
+looks down upon them from a near-by hill: "On whatever side I look
+off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have
+lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by
+grovelling, coarse, and low-minded men?--no scenery can redeem it.
+Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as
+men of a similar character." Tried by his ideal standards, his
+neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of course, found wanting,
+yet he went about among them helpful and sympathetic and enjoyed his
+life to the last gasp. These things reveal to us what a gulf there
+may be between a man's actual life and the high altitudes in which he
+disports himself when he lets go his imagination.
+
+IX
+
+In his paper called "Life without Principle," his radical idealism
+comes out: To work for money, or for subsistence alone, is life
+without principle. A man must work for the love of the work. Get a man
+to work for you who is actuated by love for you or for the work alone.
+Find some one to beat your rugs and carpets and clean out your well,
+or weed your onion-patch, who is not influenced by any money
+consideration. This were ideal, indeed; this suggests paradise.
+Thoreau probably loved his lecturing, and his surveying, and his
+magazine writing, and the money these avocations brought him did not
+seem unworthy, but could the business and industrial world safely
+adopt that principle?
+
+So far as I understand him, we all live without principle when we do
+anything that goes against the grain, or for money, or for bread
+alone. "To have done anything by which you earned money is to have
+been truly idle or worse." "If you would get money as a writer or
+lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly."
+Yet his neighbor Emerson was in much demand as a lecturer, and earned
+a good deal of money in that way. Truly idealists like Thoreau are
+hard to satisfy. Agassiz said he could not afford to give his time to
+making money, but how many Agassiz are there in the world at any one
+time? Such a man as our own Edison is influenced very little by the
+commercial value of his inventions. This is as it should be, but only
+a small fraction of mankind do or can live to ideal ends. Those who
+work for love are certainly the lucky ones, and are exceptionally
+endowed. It is love of the sport that usually sends one a-fishing or
+a-hunting, and this gives it the sanction of the Gospel according to
+Thoreau. Bradford Torrey saw a man sitting on a log down in Florida
+who told him, when he asked about his occupation, that he had no time
+to work! It is to be hoped that Thoreau enjoyed his surveying, as he
+probably did, especially when it took him through sphagnum swamps or
+scrub-oak thickets or a tangle of briers and thorns. The more
+difficult the way, the more he could summon his philosophy. "You must
+get your living by loving." It is a hard saying, but it is a part of
+his gospel. But as he on one occasion worked seventy-six days
+surveying, for only one dollar a day, the money he received should not
+be laid up against him.
+
+As a matter of fact we find Thoreau frequently engaging in manual
+labor to earn a little money. He relates in his Journal of 1857 that
+while he was living in the woods he did various jobs about
+town--fence-building, painting, gardening, carpentering:
+
+     One day a man came from the east edge of the town and said
+     that he wanted to get me to brick up a fireplace, etc.,
+     etc., for him. I told him that I was not a mason, but he
+     knew that I had built my own house entirely and would not
+     take no for an answer. So I went.
+
+     It was three miles off, and I walked back and forth each
+     day, arriving early and working as late as if I were living
+     there. The man was gone away most of the time, but had left
+     some sand dug up in his cow-yard for me to make mortar with.
+     I bricked up a fireplace, papered a chamber, but my
+     principal work was whitewashing ceilings. Some were so dirty
+     that many coats would not conceal the dirt. In the kitchen I
+     finally resorted to yellow-wash to cover the dirt. I took my
+     meals there, sitting down with my employer (when he got
+     home) and his hired men. I remember the awful condition of
+     the sink, at which I washed one day, and when I came to look
+     at what was called the towel I passed it by and wiped my
+     hands on the air, and thereafter I resorted to the pump. I
+     worked there hard three days, charging only a dollar a day.
+
+     About the same time I also contracted to build a wood-shed
+     of no mean size, for, I think, exactly six dollars, and
+     cleared about half of it by a close calculation and swift
+     working. The tenant wanted me to throw in a gutter and
+     latch, but I carried off the board that was left and gave
+     him no latch but a button. It stands yet,--behind the Kettle
+     house. I broke up Johnny Kettle's old "trow," in which he
+     kneaded his bread, for material. Going home with what nails
+     were left in a flower [_sic!_] bucket on my arm, in a rain,
+     I was about getting into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella
+     frightened the horse, and he kicked at me over the fills,
+     smashed the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on my back;
+     but while I lay on my back, his leg being caught under the
+     shaft, I got up, to see him sprawling on the other side.
+     This accident, the sudden bending of my body backwards,
+     sprained my stomach so that I did not get quite strong there
+     for several years, but had to give up some fence-building
+     and other work which I had undertaken from time to time.
+
+     I built the common slat fence for $1.50 per rod, or worked
+     for $1.00 per day. I built six fences.
+
+These homely and laborious occupations show the dreamer and
+transcendentalist of Walden in a very interesting light. In his
+practical life he was a ready and resourceful man and could set his
+neighbors a good example, and no doubt give them good advice. But what
+fun he had with his correspondents when they wrote him for practical
+advice about the conduct of their lives! One of them had evidently
+been vexing his soul over the problem of Church and State: "Why not
+make a very large mud pie and bake it in the sun? Only put no Church
+nor State into it, nor upset any other pepper box that way. Dig out a
+woodchuck--for that has nothing to do with rotting institutions. Go
+ahead."
+
+Dear, old-fashioned Wilson Flagg, who wrote pleasantly, but rather
+tamely, about New England birds and seasons, could not profit much
+from Thoreau's criticism: "He wants stirring up with a pole. He should
+practice turning a series of summer-sets rapidly, or jump up and see
+how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down.
+Let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits
+on it as on a grindstone; in short, see how many ideas he can
+entertain at once."
+
+Expect no Poor Richard maxims or counsel from Thoreau. He would tell
+you to invest your savings in the bonds of the Celestial Empire, or
+plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. He says these are
+excellent for sauce. He encourages one of his correspondents with the
+statement that he "never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and
+rolled through a mud puddle; he comes out honor bright from behind
+every storm."
+
+X
+
+All Thoreau's apparent inconsistencies and contradictions come from
+his radical idealism. In all his judgments upon men and things, and
+upon himself, he is an uncompromising idealist. All fall short. Add
+his habit of exaggeration and you have him saying that the pigs in the
+street in New York (in 1843) are the most respectable part of the
+population. The pigs, I suppose, lived up to the pig standard, but the
+people did not live up to the best human standards. Wherever the ideal
+leads him, there he follows. After his brother John's death he said he
+did not wish ever to see John again, but only the ideal John--that
+other John of whom he was but the imperfect representative. Yet the
+loss of the real John was a great blow to him, probably the severest
+in his life. But he never allows himself to go on record as showing
+any human weakness.
+
+"Comparatively," he says, "we can excuse any offense against the
+heart, but not against the imagination." Thoreau probably lived in his
+heart as much as most other persons, but his peculiar gospel is the
+work of his imagination. He could turn his idealism to practical
+account. A man who had been camping with him told me that on such
+expeditions he carried a small piece of cake carefully wrapped up in
+his pocket and that after he had eaten his dinner he would take a
+small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed to do the rest.
+
+The most unpromising subject would often kindle the imagination of
+Thoreau. His imagination fairly runs riot over poor Bill Wheeler, a
+cripple and a sot who stumped along on two clumps for feet, and who
+earned his grog by doing chores here and there. One day Thoreau found
+him asleep in the woods in a low shelter which consisted of meadow hay
+cast over a rude frame. It was a rare find to Thoreau. A man who could
+turn his back upon the town and civilization like that must be some
+great philosopher, greater than Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps
+"from a deep principle," "simplifying life, returning to nature,"
+having put off many things,--"luxuries, comforts, human society, even
+his feet,--wrestling with his thoughts." He outdid himself. He
+out-Thoreaued Thoreau: "Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk
+he indulges, in thought, only in triumphant satires on men? [More
+severe than those of the Walden hermit?] I was not sure for a moment
+but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the
+philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous
+point of view--" with much more to the same effect.
+
+Thoreau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and
+comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and
+austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this
+besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to
+contemplate.
+
+One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender human emotions in
+Thoreau, his stoical indifference is so habitual with him: "I laughed
+at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic
+story." And he excuses himself by saying, "It is not I, but Nature in
+me, which was stronger than I."
+
+It was hard for Thoreau to get interested in young women. He once went
+to an evening party of thirty or forty of them, "in a small room,
+warm and noisy." He was introduced to two of them, but could not hear
+what they said, there was such a cackling. He concludes by saying:
+"The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever
+tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure
+whether they are there or not."
+
+XI
+
+As a philosopher or expositor and interpreter of a principle, Thoreau
+is often simply grotesque. His passion for strong and striking figures
+usually gets the best of him. In discussing the relation that exists
+between the speaker or lecturer and his audience he says, "The
+lecturer will read best those parts of his lecture which are best
+heard," as if the reading did not precede the hearing! Then comes this
+grotesque analogy: "I saw some men unloading molasses-hogsheads from a
+truck at a depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined plane. The
+truckman stood behind and shoved, after putting a couple of ropes, one
+round each end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the depot
+steadily pulled at the ropes. The first man was the lecturer, the last
+was the audience." I suppose the hogshead stands for the big thoughts
+of the speaker which he cannot manage at all without the active
+coöperation of the audience. The truth is, people assemble in a
+lecture hall in a passive but expectant frame of mind. They are ready
+to be pleased or displeased. They are there like an instrument to be
+played upon by the orator. He may work his will with them. Without
+their sympathy his success will not be great, but the triumph of his
+art is to win their sympathy. Those who went to scoff when the Great
+Preacher spoke, remained to pray. No man could speak as eloquently to
+empty seats, or to a dummy audience, as to a hall filled with
+intelligent people, yet Thoreau's ropes and hogsheads and pulling and
+pushing truckmen absurdly misrepresent the true relation that exists
+between a speaker and his hearers. Of course a speaker finds it uphill
+work if his audience is not with him, but that it is not with him is
+usually his own fault.
+
+Thoreau's merits as a man and a writer are so many and so great that I
+have not hesitated to make much of his defects. Indeed, I have with
+malice aforethought ransacked his works to find them. But after they
+are all charged up against him, the balance that remains on the credit
+side of the account is so great that they do not disturb us.
+
+There has been but one Thoreau, and we should devoutly thank the gods
+of New England for the precious gift. Thoreau's work lives and will
+continue to live because, in the first place, the world loves a writer
+who can flout it and turn his back upon it and yet make good; and
+again because the books which he gave to the world have many and very
+high literary and ethical values. They are fresh, original, and
+stimulating. He drew a gospel out of the wild; he brought messages
+from the wood gods to men; he made a lonely pond in Massachusetts a
+fountain of the purest and most elevating thoughts, and, with his
+great neighbor Emerson, added new luster to a town over which the muse
+of our colonial history had long loved to dwell.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN
+
+I
+
+
+It is never safe to question Darwin's facts, but it is always safe to
+question any man's theories. It is with Darwin's theories that I am
+mainly concerned here. He has already been shorn of his selection
+doctrines as completely as Samson was shorn of his locks, but there
+are other phases of his life and teachings that invite discussion.
+
+The study of Darwin's works begets such an affection for the man, for
+the elements of character displayed on every page, that one is slow in
+convincing one's self that anything is wrong with his theories. There
+is danger that one's critical judgment will be blinded by one's
+partiality for the man.
+
+For the band of brilliant men who surrounded him and championed his
+doctrines--Spencer, Huxley, Lyall, Hooker, and others--one feels
+nothing more personal than admiration; unless the eloquent and
+chivalrous Huxley--the knight in shining armor of the Darwinian
+theory--inspires a warmer feeling. Darwin himself almost disarms one
+by his amazing candor and his utter self-abnegation. The question
+always paramount in his mind is, what is the truth about this matter?
+What fact have you got for me, he seems to say, that will upset my
+conclusion? If you have one, that is just what I am looking for.
+
+Could we have been permitted to gaze upon the earth in the middle
+geologic period, in Jurassic or Triassic times, we should have seen it
+teeming with huge, uncouth, gigantic forms of animal life, in the sea,
+on the land, and in the air, and with many lesser forms, but with no
+sign of man anywhere; ransack the earth from pole to pole and there
+was no sign or suggestion, so far as we could have seen, of a human
+being.
+
+Come down the stream of time several millions of years--to our own
+geologic age--and we find the earth swarming with the human species
+like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found
+in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the
+earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they
+come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that a hand reached down
+from heaven, or up from below, and placed them there. There is no
+alternative but to believe that in some way they arose out of the
+antecedent animal life of the globe; in other words that man is the
+result of the process of evolution, and that all other existing forms
+of life, vegetable and animal, are a product of the same movement.
+
+To explain how this came about, what factors and forces entered into
+the transformation, is the task that Darwin set himself. It was a
+mighty task, and whether or not his solution of the problem stands the
+test of time, we must yet bow in reverence before one of the greatest
+of natural philosophers; for even to have conceived this problem thus
+clearly, and to have placed it in intelligible form before men's
+minds, is a great achievement.
+
+Darwin was as far from being as sure of the truth of Darwinism as many
+of his disciples were, and still are. He said in 1860, in a letter to
+one of his American correspondents, "I have never for a moment doubted
+that, though I cannot see my errors, much of my book ["The Origin of
+Species"] will be proved erroneous." Again he said, in 1862, "I look
+at it as absolutely certain that very much in the 'Origin' will be
+proved rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand."
+
+Its framework is the theory of Evolution, which is very sure to stand.
+In its inception his theory is half-miracle and half-fact. He assumes
+that in the beginning (as if there ever was or could be a "beginning,"
+in that sense) God created a few forms, animal and vegetable, and then
+left it to the gods of Evolution, the chief of which is Natural
+Selection, to do the rest. While Darwin would not admit any
+predetermining factors in Evolution, or that any innate tendency to
+progressive development existed, he said he could not look upon the
+world of living things as the result of chance. Yet in fortuitous, or
+chance, variation he saw one of the chief factors of Evolution.
+
+The world of Chance into which Darwinism delivers us--what can the
+thoughtful mind make of it?
+
+That life with all its myriad forms is the result of chance is,
+according to Professor Osborn, a biological dogma. He everywhere uses
+the word "chance" as opposed to law, or to the sequence of cause and
+effect. This, it seems to me, is a misuse of the term. Is law, in this
+sense, ever suspended or annulled? If one chances to fall off his
+horse or his house, is it not gravity that pulls him down? Are not the
+laws of energy everywhere operative in all movements of matter in the
+material world? Chance is not opposed to law, but to design. Anything
+that befalls us that was not designed is a matter of chance. The
+fortuitous enters largely into all human life. If I carelessly toss a
+stone across the road, it is a matter of chance just where it will
+fall, but its course is not lawless. Does not gravity act upon it?
+does not the resistance of the air act upon it? does not the muscular
+force of my arm act upon it? and does not this complex of physical
+forces determine the precise spot where the stone shall fall? If, in
+its fall, it were to hit a bird or a mouse or a flower, that would be
+a matter of chance, so far as my will was concerned. Is not a meteoric
+stone falling out of space acted upon by similar forces, which
+determine where it shall strike the earth? In this case, we must
+substitute for the energy of my arm the cosmic energy that gives the
+primal impetus to all heavenly bodies. If the falling aërolite were to
+hit a person or a house, we should say it was a matter of chance,
+because it was not planned or designed. But when the shells of the
+long-range guns hit their invisible target or the bombs from the
+airplanes hit their marks, chance plays a part, because all the
+factors that enter into the problem are not and cannot be on the
+instant accurately measured. The collision of two heavenly bodies in
+the depth of space, which does happen, is, from our point of view, a
+matter of chance, although governed by inexorable law.
+
+The forms of inanimate objects--rocks, hills, rivers, lakes--are
+matters of chance, since they serve no purpose: any other form would
+be as fit; but the forms of living things are always purposeful. Is it
+possible to believe that the human body, with all its complicated
+mechanism, its many wonderful organs of secretion and excretion and
+assimilation, is any more matter of chance than a watch or a
+phonograph is? Though what agent to substitute for the word "chance,"
+I confess I do not know. The short cut to an omnipotent Creator
+sitting apart from the thing created will not satisfy the naturalist.
+And to make energy itself creative, as Professor Osborn does, is only
+to substitute one god for another. I can no more think of the course
+of organic evolution as being accidental in the Darwinian sense, than
+I can think of the evolution of the printing-press or the aëroplane as
+being accidental, although chance has played its part. Can we think of
+the first little horse of which we have any record, the eohippus of
+three or four millions of years ago, as evolving by accidental
+variations into the horse of our time, without presupposing an equine
+impulse to development? As well might we trust our ships to the winds
+and waves with the expectation that they will reach their several
+ports.
+
+Are we to believe that we live in an entirely mechanical and
+fortuitous world--a world which has no interior, which is only a maze
+of acting, reacting, and interacting of blind physical forces?
+According to the chance theory, the struggle of a living body to exist
+does not differ from the vicissitudes of, say, water seeking an
+equilibrium, or heat a uniform temperature.
+
+Chance has played an important part in human history, and in all
+life-history--often, no doubt, the main part--since history began. It
+was by chance that Columbus discovered America; he simply blundered
+upon it. He had set out on his voyage with something quite different
+in view. But his ship, and the crew, and the voyage itself, were not
+matters of chance but of purpose.
+
+According to the selectionists' theory, chance gave the bird its
+wings, the fish its fins, the porcupine its quills, the skunk its
+fetid secretion, the cuttlefish its ink, the swordfish its sword, the
+electric eel its powerful battery; it gave the giraffe its long neck,
+the camel its hump, the horse its hoof, the ruminants their horns and
+double stomach, and so on. According to Weismann, it gave us our eyes,
+our ears, our hands with the fingers and opposing thumb, it gave us
+all the complicated and wonderful organs of our bodies, and all their
+circulation, respiration, digestion, assimilation, secretion,
+excretion, reproduction. All we are, or can be, the selectionist
+credits to Natural Selection.
+
+Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, with all its marvelous
+powers and adaptations, as the result of what we call chance or
+Natural Selection. Well may Darwin have said that the eye made him
+shudder when he tried to account for it by Natural Selection. Why, its
+adaptations in one respect alone, minor though they be, are enough to
+stagger any number of selectionists. I refer to the rows of peculiar
+glands that secrete an oily substance, differing in chemical
+composition from any other secretion, a secretion which keeps the
+eyelids from sticking together in sleep. "Behavior as lawless as
+snowflakes," says Whitman--a phrase which probably stuck to him from
+Rousseau; but are snowflakes and raindrops lawless? To us creatures of
+purpose, they are so because the order of their falling is haphazard.
+They obey their own laws. Again we see chance working inside of law.
+
+When the sower scatters the seed-grains from his hand, he does not and
+cannot determine the point of soil upon which any of them shall fall,
+but there is design in his being there and in sowing the seed.
+Astronomy is an exact science, biology is not. The celestial events
+always happen on time. The astronomers can tell us to the fraction of
+a second when the eclipses of the sun and moon and the transit of the
+inferior planets across the sun's disk will take place. They know and
+have measured all the forces that bring them about. Now, if we knew
+with the same mathematical precision all the elements that enter into
+the complex of forces which shapes our lives, could we forecast the
+future with the same accuracy with which the astronomers forecast the
+movements of the orbs? or are there incommensurable factors in life?
+
+II
+
+How are we to reconcile the obvious hit-and-miss method of Nature with
+the reign of law, or with a world of design? Consider the seeds of a
+plant or a tree, as sown by the wind. It is a matter of chance where
+they alight; it is hit or miss with them always. Yet the seeds, say,
+of the cat-tail flag always find the wet or the marshy places. If they
+had a topographical map of the country and a hundred eyes they could
+not succeed better. Of course, there are vastly more failures than
+successes with them, but one success in ten thousand trials is enough.
+They go to all points of the compass with the wind, and sooner or
+later hit the mark. Chance decides where the seed shall fall, but it
+was not chance that gave wings to this and other seeds. The hooks and
+wings and springs and parachutes that wind-sown seeds possess are not
+matters of chance: they all show design. So here is design working in
+a hit-and-miss world.
+
+There are chance details in any general plan. The general forms which
+a maple or an oak or an elm takes in the forest or in the field are
+fixed, but many of the details are quite accidental. All the
+individual trees of a species have a general resemblance, but one
+differs from another in the number and exact distribution of the
+branches, and in many other ways. We cannot solve the fundamental
+problems of biology by addition and subtraction. He who sees nothing
+transcendent and mysterious in the universe does not see deeply; he
+lacks that vision without which the people perish. All organic and
+structural changes are adaptive from the first; they do not need
+natural selection to whip them into shape. All it can do is to serve
+as a weeding-out process.
+
+Acquired characters are not inherited, but those organic changes which
+are the result of the indwelling impulse of development are inherited.
+So dominant and fundamental are the results of this impulse that
+cross-breeding does not wipe them out.
+
+III
+
+While I cannot believe that we live in a world of chance, any more
+than Darwin could, yet I feel that I am as free from any teleological
+taint as he was. The world-old notion of a creator and director,
+sitting apart from the universe and shaping and controlling all its
+affairs, a magnified king or emperor, finds no lodgment in my mind.
+Kings and despots have had their day, both in heaven and on earth. The
+universe is a democracy. The Whole directs the Whole. Every particle
+plays its own part, and yet the universe is a unit as much as is the
+human body, with all its myriad of individual cells, and all its many
+separate organs functioning in harmony. And the mind I see in nature
+is just as obvious as the mind I see in myself, and subject to the
+same imperfections and limitations.
+
+In following Lamarck I am not disturbed by the bogey of teleology, or
+the ghost of mysticism. I am persuaded that there is something
+immanent in the universe, pervading every atom and molecule in it,
+that knows what it wants--a Cosmic Mind or Intelligence that we must
+take account of if we would make any headway in trying to understand
+the world in which we find ourselves.
+
+When we deny God it is always in behalf of some other god. We are
+compelled to recognize something not ourselves from which we proceed,
+and in which we live and move and have our being, call it energy, or
+will, or Jehovah, or Ancient of Days. We cannot deny it because we are
+a part of it. As well might the fountain deny the sea or the cloud.
+Each of us is a fraction of the universal Eternal Intelligence. Is it
+unscientific to believe that our own minds have their counterpart or
+their origin in the nature of which we form a part? Is our own
+intelligence all there is of mind-manifestation in the universe? Where
+did we get this divine gift? Did we take all there was of it?
+Certainly we did not ourselves invent it. It would require
+considerable wit to do that. Mind is immanent in nature, but in man
+alone it becomes self-conscious. Wherever there is adaptation of means
+to an end, there is mind.
+
+Yet we use the terms "guidance," "predetermination," and so on, at the
+risk of being misunderstood. All such terms are charged with the
+meaning that our daily lives impart to them and, when applied to the
+processes of the Cosmos, are only half-truths. From our experience
+with objects and forces in this world, the earth ought to rest upon
+something, and that object upon something, and the moon ought to fall
+upon the earth, and the earth fall into the sun, and, in fact, the
+whole sidereal system ought to collapse. But it does not, and will
+not. As nearly as we can put it into words, the whole visible universe
+floats in a boundless and fathomless sea of energy; and that is all we
+know about it.
+
+If chance brought us here and endowed us with our bodies and our
+minds, and keeps us here, and adapts us to the world in which we live,
+is not Chance a good enough god for any of us? Or if Natural Selection
+did it, or orthogenesis or epigenesis, or any other genesis, have we
+not in any of these found a god equal to the occasion? Darwin goes
+wrong, if I may be allowed to say so, when he describes or
+characterizes the activities of Nature in terms of our own activities.
+Man's selection affords no clue to Nature's selection, and the best to
+man is not the best to Nature. For instance, she is concerned with
+color and form only so far as they have survival value. We are
+concerned more with intrinsic values.
+
+"Man," says Darwin, "selects only for his own good; Nature only for
+the good of the being which she tends." But Nature's good is of
+another order than man's: it is the good of all. Nature aims at a
+general good, man at a particular good to himself. Man waters his
+garden; Nature sends the rain broadcast upon the just and the unjust,
+upon the sea as upon the land. Man directs and controls his planting
+and his harvesting along specific lines: he selects his seed and
+prepares his soil; Nature has no system in this respect: she trusts
+her seeds to the winds and the waters, and to beasts and birds, and
+her harvest rarely fails.
+
+Nature's methods, we say, are blind, haphazard; the wind blows where
+it listeth, and the seeds fall where the winds and waters carry them;
+the frosts blight this section and spare that; the rains flood the
+country in the West and the drought burns up the vegetation in the
+East. And yet we survive and prosper. Nature averages up well. We see
+nothing like purpose or will in her total scheme of things, yet inside
+her hit-and-miss methods, her storms and tornadoes and earthquakes and
+distempers, we see a fundamental benefaction. If it is not good-will,
+it amounts to the same thing. Our fathers saw special providences, but
+we see only unchangeable laws. To compare Nature's selection with
+man's selection is like arguing from man's art to Nature's art.
+Nature has no art, no architecture, no music. Her temples, as the
+poets tell us, are the woods, her harps the branches of the trees, her
+minstrels the birds and insects, her gardens the fields and
+waysides--all safe comparisons for purposes of literature, but not for
+purposes of science.
+
+Man alone selects, or works by a definite method. Might we not as well
+say that Nature ploughs and plants and trims and harvests? We pick out
+our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our
+purpose. We go straight to our object, with as little delay and waste
+as possible. Not so Nature. Her course is always a round-about one.
+Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Our choice selection of
+rich milkers, prolific poultry, or heavy-fleeced sheep is with her
+quickly sacrificed for the qualities of strength and cunning and
+speed, as these alone have survival value. Man wants specific results
+at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled
+only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of
+her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome.
+
+What is called Darwinism is entirely an anthropomorphic view of
+Nature--Nature humanized and doing as man does. What is called Natural
+Selection is man's selection read into animate nature. We see in
+nature what we have to call intelligence--the adaptation of means to
+ends. We see purpose in all living things, but not in the same sense
+in non-living things. The purpose is not in the light, but in the eye;
+in the ear, but not in the sound; in the lungs, and not in the air; in
+the stomach, and not in the food; in the various organs of the body,
+and not in the forces that surround and act upon it. We cannot say
+that the purpose of the clouds is to bring rain, or of the sun to give
+light and warmth, in the sense that we can say it is the purpose of
+the eyelid to protect the eye, of the teeth to masticate the food, or
+of the varnish upon the leaves to protect the leaves.
+
+The world was not made for us, but we are here because the world was
+made as it is. We are the secondary fact and not the primary. Nature
+is non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scientific, though it is
+from her that we get our ideas of all these things. All parts and
+organs of living bodies have, or have had, a purpose. Nature is blind,
+but she knows what she wants and she gets it. She is blind, I say,
+because she is all eyes, and sees through the buds of her trees and
+the rootlets of her plants as well as by the optic nerves in her
+animals. And, though I believe that the accumulation of variations is
+the key to new species, yet this accumulation is not based upon
+outward utility but upon an innate tendency to development--the push
+of life, or creative evolution, as Bergson names it; not primarily
+because the variations are advantages, but because the formation of a
+new species is such a slow process, stretches over such a period of
+geologic time, that the slight variations from generation to
+generation could have no survival value. The primary factor is the
+inherent tendency to development. The origin of species is on a scale
+of time of enormous magnitude. What takes place among our domestic
+animals of a summer day is by no means a safe guide as to what befell
+their ancestors in the abysses of geologic time. It is true that
+Nature may be read in the little as well as in the big,--_Natura in
+minimis existat_,--in the gnat as well as in the elephant; but she
+cannot be read in our yearly calendars as she can in the calendars of
+the geologic strata. Species go out and species come in; the book of
+natural revelation opens and closes at chance places, and rarely do we
+get a continuous record--in no other case more clearly than in that of
+the horse.
+
+The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed animal in Eocene
+times, millions of years ago, through all the intermediate forms of
+four-toed and three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature of our
+own day. Amid all the hazards and delays of that vast stretch of time,
+one may say, the horse-impulse never faltered. The survival value of
+the slight gains in size and strength from millennium to millennium
+could have played no part. It was the indwelling necessity toward
+development that determined the issue. This assertion does not deliver
+us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that
+ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little
+eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is
+potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever
+element of mystery may enter into the problem.
+
+In fields where speed wins, the fleetest are the fittest. In fields
+where strength wins, the strongest are the fittest. In fields where
+sense-acuteness wins, the keenest of eye, ears, and nose are the
+fittest.
+
+When we come to the race of man, the fittest to survive, from our
+moral and intellectual point of view, is not always the best. The
+lower orders of humanity are usually better fitted to survive than the
+higher orders--they are much more prolific and adaptive. The tares are
+better fitted to survive than the wheat. Every man's hand is against
+the weeds, and every man's hand gives a lift to the corn and the
+wheat, but the weeds do not fail. There is nothing like original sin
+to keep a man or a plant going. Emerson's gardener was probably better
+fitted to survive than Emerson; Newton's butler than Newton himself.
+
+Most naturalists will side with Darwin in rejecting the idea of Asa
+Gray, that the stream of variation has been guided by a higher power,
+unless they think of the will of this power as inherent in every
+molecule of matter; but guidance in the usual theological sense is not
+to be thought of; the principle of guidance cannot be separated from
+the thing guided. It recalls a parable of Charles Kingsley's which he
+related to Huxley. A heathen khan in Tartary was visited by a pair of
+proselytizing moollahs. The first moollah said, "O Khan, worship my
+god. He is so wise that he made all things!" Moollah Number Two said,
+"O Khan, worship my god. He is so wise that he makes all things make
+themselves!" Number Two won the day.
+
+IV
+
+How often it turns out that a man's minor works outlive his major!
+This is true in both literature and science, but more often in the
+former than in the latter. Darwin furnishes a case in the field of
+science. He evidently looked upon his "Origin of Species" as his great
+contribution to biological science; but it is highly probable that his
+"Voyage of the Beagle" will outlast all his other books. The "Voyage"
+is of perennial interest and finds new readers in each generation. I
+find myself re-reading it every eight or ten years. I have lately read
+it for the fourth time. It is not an argument or a polemic; it is a
+personal narrative of a disinterested yet keen observer, and is
+always fresh and satisfying. For the first time we see a comparatively
+unknown country like South America through the eyes of a born and
+trained naturalist. It is the one book of his that makes a wide appeal
+and touches life and nature the most closely.
+
+We may say that Darwin was a Darwinian from the first,--a naturalist
+and a philosopher combined,--and was predisposed to look at animate
+nature in the way his works have since made us familiar with.
+
+In his trip on the Beagle he saw from the start with the eyes of a
+born evolutionist. In South America he saw the fossil remains of the
+Toxodon, and observed, "How wonderful are the different orders, at the
+present time so well separated, blended together in the different
+points of the structure of the Toxodon!" All forms of life attracted
+him. He looked into the brine-pans of Lymington and found that water
+with one quarter of a pound of salt to the pint was inhabited, and he
+was led to say: "Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+habitable! Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean ones hidden
+beneath volcanic mountains,--warm mineral springs,--the wide expanse
+and depth of the ocean,--the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even
+the surface of perpetual snow,--all support organic beings."
+
+He studies the parasitical habit of the cuckoo and hits on an
+explanation of it. He speculates why the partridges and deer in South
+America are so tame.
+
+His "Voyage of the Beagle" alone would insure him lasting fame. It is
+a classic among scientific books of travel. Here is a traveler of a
+new kind: a natural-history voyager, a man bent on seeing and taking
+note of everything going on in nature about him, in the non-human, as
+well as in the human world. The minuteness of his observation and the
+significance of its subject-matter are a lesson to all observers.
+Darwin's interests are so varied and genuine. One sees in this volume
+the seed-bed of much of his subsequent work. He was quite a young man
+(twenty-four) when he made this voyage; he was ill more than half the
+time; he was as yet only an observer and appreciator of Nature, quite
+free from any theories about her ways and methods. He says that this
+was by far the most important event of his life and determined his
+whole career. His theory of descent was already latent in his mind, as
+is evinced by an observation he made about the relationship in South
+America between the extinct and the living forms. "This relationship,"
+he said, "will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the
+appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance
+from it, than any other class of facts."
+
+He looked into the muddy waters of the sea off the coast of Chile, and
+found a curious new form of minute life--microscopic animals that
+exploded as they swam through the water. In South America he saw an
+intimate relationship between the extinct species of ant-eaters,
+armadillos, tapirs, peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and so on, and the
+living species of these animals; and he adds that the wonderful
+relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living
+would doubtless hereafter throw more light on the appearance of
+organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any
+other class of facts.
+
+His observation of the evidences of the rise and fall of thousands of
+feet of the earth along the Cordilleras leads him to make this rather
+startling statement: "Daily it is forced home on the mind of the
+geologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable
+as the level of the crust of the earth."
+
+There is now and then a twinkle of humor in Darwin's eyes, as when he
+says that in the high altitude of the Andes the inhabitants recommend
+onions for the "puna," or shortness of breath, but that he found
+nothing so good as fossil shells.
+
+Water boils at such a low temperature in the high Andes that potatoes
+will not cook if boiled all night. Darwin heard his guides discussing
+the cause. "They had come to the simple conclusion that 'the cursed
+pot' (which was a new one) did not choose to boil potatoes."
+
+In all Darwin's record we see that the book of nature, which ordinary
+travelers barely glance at, he opened and carefully perused.
+
+V
+
+Natural Selection turns out to be of only secondary importance. It is
+not creative, but only confirmative. It is a weeding-out process; it
+is Nature's way of improving the stock. Its tendency is to make
+species more and more hardy and virile. The weak and insufficiently
+endowed among all forms tend to drop out. Life to all creatures is
+more or less a struggle, a struggle with the environment, with the
+inorganic forces,--storm, heat, cold, sterile land, and engulfing
+floods,--and it is a struggle with competing forms for food and
+shelter and a place in the sun. The strongest, the most amply endowed
+with what we call vitality or power to live, win. Species have come to
+be what they are through this process. Immunity from disease comes
+through this fight for life; and adaptability--through trial and
+struggle species adapt themselves, as do our own bodies, to new and
+severe conditions. The naturally weak fall by the wayside as in an
+army on a forced march.
+
+Every creature becomes the stronger by the opposition it overcomes.
+Natural Selection gives speed, where speed is the condition of
+safety, strength where strength is the condition, keenness and
+quickness of sense-perception where these are demanded. Natural
+Selection works upon these attributes and tends to perfect them. Any
+group of men or beasts or birds brought under any unusual strain from
+cold, hunger, labor, effort, will undergo a weeding-out process.
+Populate the land with more animal life than it can support, or with
+more vegetable forms than it can sustain, and a weeding-out process
+will begin. A fuller measure of vitality, or a certain hardiness and
+toughness, will enable some species to hold on longer than others,
+and, maybe, keep up the fight till the struggle lessens and victory is
+won.
+
+The flame of life is easily blown out in certain forms, and is very
+tenacious in others. How unequally the power to resist cold, for
+instance, seems to be distributed among plants and trees, and probably
+among animals! One spring an unseasonable cold snap in May (mercury
+28) killed or withered about one per cent of the leaves on the lilacs,
+and one tenth of one per cent of the leaves of our crab-apple tree. In
+the woods around Slabsides I observed that nearly half the plants of
+Solomon's-seal (_Polygonatum_) and false Solomon's-seal (_Smilacina_)
+were withered. The vital power, the power to live, seems stronger in
+some plants than in others of the same kind. I suppose this law holds
+throughout animate nature. When a strain of any kind comes, these
+weaker ones drop out. In reading the stories of Arctic explorers, I
+see this process going on among their dog-teams: some have greater
+power of endurance than others. A few are constantly dropping out or
+falling by the wayside. With an army on a forced march the same thing
+happens. In the struggle for existence the weak go to the wall. Of
+course the struggle among animals is at least a toughening process. It
+seems as if the old Indian legend, that the strength of the foe
+overcome passes into the victor, were true. But how a new species
+could arrive as the result of such struggle is past finding out.
+Variation with all forms of life is more or less constant, but it is
+around a given mean. Only those acquired characters are transmitted
+that arise from the needs of the organism.
+
+A vast number of changes in plants and animals are superficial and in
+no way vital. It is hard to find two leaves of the same tree that will
+exactly coincide in all their details; but a difference that was in
+some way a decided advantage would tend to be inherited and passed
+along. It is said that the rabbits in Australia have developed a
+longer and stronger nail on the first toe of each front foot, which
+aids them in climbing over the wire fences. The aye-aye has a
+specially adapted finger for extracting insects from their
+hiding-places. Undoubtedly such things are inherited. The snowshoes
+of the partridge and rabbit are inherited. The needs of the organism
+influence structure. The spines in the quills in the tails of
+woodpeckers, and in the brown creeper, are other cases in point. The
+nuthatch has no spines on its tail, because it can move in all
+directions, as well with head down as with head up. I have read of a
+serpent somewhere that feeds upon eggs. As the serpent has no lips or
+distendable cheeks, and as its mechanism of deglutition acts very
+slowly, an egg crushed in the mouth would be mostly spilled. So the
+eggs are swallowed whole; but in the throat they come in contact with
+sharp tooth-like spines, which are not teeth, but downward projections
+from the backbone, and which serve to break the shells of the eggs.
+Radical or vital variations are rare, and we do not witness them any
+more than we witness the birth of a new species. And that is all there
+is to Natural Selection. It is a name for a process of elimination
+which is constantly going on in animate nature all about us. It is in
+no sense creative, it originates nothing, but clinches and toughens
+existing forms.
+
+The mutation theory of De Vries is a much more convincing theory of
+the origin of species than is Darwin's Natural Selection. If things
+would only mutate a little oftener! But they seem very reluctant to do
+so. There does seem to have been some mutation among plants,--De
+Vries has discovered several such,--but in animal life where are the
+mutants? When or where has a new species originated in this way?
+Surely not during the historic period.
+
+Fluctuations are in all directions around a center--the mean is always
+returned to; but mutations, or the progressive steps in evolution, are
+divergent lines away from the center. Fluctuations are superficial and
+of little significance; but mutations, if they occur, involve
+deep-seated, fundamental factors, factors more or less responsive to
+the environment, but not called into being by it. Of the four factors
+in the Darwinian formula,--variation, heredity, the struggle, and
+natural selection,--variation is the most negligible; it furnishes an
+insufficient handle for selection to take hold of. Something more
+radical must lead the way to new species.
+
+As applied to species, the fittest to survive is a misleading term.
+All are fit to survive from the fact that they do survive. In a world
+where, as a rule, the race is to the swift and the battle to the
+strong, the slow and the frail also survive because they do not come
+in competition with the swift and the strong. Nature mothers all, and
+assigns to each its sphere.
+
+The Darwinians are hostile to Lamarck with his inner developing and
+perfecting principle, and, by the same token, to Aristotle, who is
+the father of the theory. They regard organic evolution as a purely
+mechanical process.
+
+Variation can work only upon a variable tendency--an inherent impulse
+to development. A rock, a hill, a stream, may change, but it is not
+variable in the biological sense: it can never become anything but a
+rock, a hill, a stream; but a flower, an egg, a seed, a plant, a baby,
+can. What I mean to say is that there must be the primordial tendency
+to development which Natural Selection is powerless to beget, and
+which it can only speed up or augment. It cannot give the wing to the
+seed, or the spring, or the hook; or the feather to the bird; or the
+scale to the fish; but it can perfect all these things. The fittest of
+its kind does stand the best chance to survive.
+
+VI
+
+After we have Darwin shorn of his selection theories, what has he
+left? His significance is not lessened. He is still the most
+impressive figure in modern biological science. His attitude of mind,
+the problems he tackled, his methods of work, the nature and scope of
+his inquiries, together with his candor, and his simplicity and
+devotion to truth, are a precious heritage to all mankind.
+
+Darwin's work is monumental because he belongs to the class of
+monumental men. The doctrine of evolution as applied to animate
+nature reached its complete evolution in his mind. He stated the
+theory in broader and fuller terms than had any man before him; he
+made it cover the whole stupendous course of evolution. He showed man
+once for all an integral part of the zoölogic system. He elevated
+natural history, or biology, to the ranks of the great sciences, a
+worthy member of the triumvirate--astronomy, geology, biology. He
+taught us how to cross-question the very gods of life in their council
+chambers; he showed us what significance attaches to the simplest
+facts of natural history.
+
+Darwin impresses by his personality not less than by his logic and his
+vast storehouse of observations. He was a great man before he was a
+great natural-history philosopher. His patient and painstaking
+observation is a lesson to all nature students. The minutest facts
+engaged him. He studies the difference between the stamens of the same
+plant. He counted nine thousand seeds, one by one, from artificially
+fertilized pods. Plants from two pollens, he says, grow at different
+rates. Any difference in the position of the pistil, or in the size
+and color of the stamens, in individuals of the same species grown
+together, was of keen interest to him.
+
+The best thing about Darwinism is Darwin--his candor, his patience,
+his simplicity, his devotion to truth, and his power of observation.
+This is about what Professor T. H. Morgan meant when he said: "It is
+the spirit of Darwinism, not its formulæ, that we proclaim as our best
+heritage." He gave us a new point of view of the drama of creation; he
+gave us ideas that are applicable to the whole domain of human
+activities. It is true, he was not a pioneer in this field: he did not
+blaze the first trail through this wilderness of biological facts and
+records; rather was he like a master-engineer who surveys and
+establishes the great highway. All the world now travels along the
+course he established and perfected. He made the long road of
+evolution easy, and he placed upon permanent foundations the doctrine
+of the animal origin of man. He taught the world to think in terms of
+evolution, and he pointed the way to a rational explanation of the
+diversity of living forms.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+WHAT MAKES A POEM?
+
+
+Pope said that a middling poet was no poet at all. Middling things in
+art or in any field of human endeavor do not arouse our enthusiasm,
+and it is enthusiasm that fans the fires of life. There are all
+degrees of excellence, but in poetry one is always looking for the
+best. Pope himself holds a place in English literature which he could
+not hold had he been only a middling poet. He is not a poet of the
+highest order certainly, but a poet of the third or fourth order--the
+poet of the reason, the understanding, but not of the creative
+imagination. It is wit and not soul that keeps Pope alive.
+
+Nearly every age and land has plenty of middling poets. Probably there
+were never more of them in the land than there are to-day. Scores of
+volumes of middling verse are issued from the press every week. The
+magazines all have middling verse; only at rare intervals do they have
+something more. The May "Atlantic," for instance, had a poem by a (to
+me) comparatively new writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, that one would
+hardly stigmatize as middling poetry. Let the reader judge for
+himself. It is called "Spring in the Study." I quote only the second
+part:
+
+    "What is this sudden gayety that shakes the grayest boughs?
+    A voice is calling fieldward--'T is time to start the ploughs!
+    To set the furrows rolling, while all the old crows nod;
+    And deep as life, the kernel, to cut the golden sod.
+    The pen--let nations have it;--we'll plough a while for God.
+
+    "When half the things that must be done are greater than our art,
+    And half the things that must be done are smaller than our heart,
+    And poorest gifts are dear to burn on altars unrevealed,
+    Like music comes the summons, the challenge from the weald!
+    'They tread immortal measures who make a mellow field!'
+
+    "The planet's rather pleasant, alluring in its way;
+    But let the ploughs be idle and none of us can stay.
+    Here's where there is no doubting, no ghosts uncertain stalk,
+    A-traveling with the plough beam, beneath the sailing hawk,
+    Cutting the furrow deep and true where Destiny will walk."
+
+Lafcadio Hearn spoke with deep truth when he said that "the measure of
+a poet is the largeness of thought which he can bring to any subject,
+however trifling." Certainly Mrs. Dargan brings this largeness of
+thought to her subject. Has the significance of the plough ever before
+been so brought out? She makes one feel that there should be a plough
+among the constellations. What are the chairs and harps and dippers in
+comparison?
+
+The poetry of mere talent is always middling poetry--"poems distilled
+from other poems," as Whitman says. The work of a genius is of a
+different order. Most current verse is merely sweetened prose put up
+in verse form. It serves its purpose; the mass of readers like it.
+Nearly all educated persons can turn it off with little effort. I have
+done my share of it myself--rhymed natural history, but not poetry.
+"Waiting" is my nearest approach to a true poem.
+
+Wordsworth quotes Aristotle as saying that poetry is the most
+philosophical of all writing, and Wordsworth agrees with him. There
+certainly can be no great poetry without a great philosopher behind
+it--a man who has thought and felt profoundly upon nature and upon
+life, as Wordsworth himself surely had. The true poet, like the
+philosopher, is a searcher after truth, and a searcher at the very
+heart of things--not cold, objective truth, but truth which is its own
+testimony, and which is carried alive into the heart by passion. He
+seeks more than beauty, he seeks the perennial source of beauty. The
+poet leads man to nature as a mother leads her child there--to instill
+a love of it into his heart. If a poet adds neither to my knowledge
+nor to my love, of what use is he? For instance, Poe does not make me
+know more or love more, but he delights me by his consummate art.
+Bryant's long poem "The Ages" has little value, mainly because it is
+charged with no philosophy, and no imaginative emotion. His "Lines to
+a Waterfowl" will last because of the simple, profound human emotion
+they awaken. The poem is marred, however, by the stanza that he tacks
+on the end, which strikes a note entirely foreign to the true spirit
+of the poem. You cannot by tacking a moral to a poem give it the
+philosophical breadth to which I have referred. "Thanatopsis" has a
+solemn and majestic music, but not the unique excellence of the
+waterfowl poem. Yet it may be generally said of Bryant that he has a
+broad human outlook on life and is free from the subtleties and
+ingenious refinements of many of our younger poets.
+
+I know of only three poets in this century who bring a large measure
+of thought and emotion to their task. I refer to William Vaughn Moody,
+to John Russell McCarthy (author of "Out-of-Doors" and "Gods and
+Devils"), and to Robert Loveman, best known for his felicitous "Rain
+Song," a poem too well known to be quoted here. Any poet who has ever
+lived might have been proud to have written that poem. It goes as
+lightly as thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its philosophy
+is so sublimated and so natural and easy that we are likely to forget
+that it has any philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his
+"Gates of Silence" are probably far less well known. Let me quote a
+few of them:
+
+    "The races rise and fall,
+      The nations come and go,
+    Time tenderly doth cover all
+      With violets and snow.
+
+    "The mortal tide moves on
+      To some immortal shore,
+    Past purple peaks of dusk and dawn,
+      Into the evermore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "All the tomes of all the tribes,
+    All the songs of all the scribes,
+    All that priest and prophet say,
+    What is it? and what are they?
+
+    "Fancies futile, feeble, vain,
+    Idle dream-drift of the brain,--
+    As of old the mystery
+    Doth encompass you and me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Old and yet young, the jocund Earth
+      Doth speed among the spheres,
+    Her children of imperial birth
+      Are all the golden years.
+
+    "The happy orb sweeps on,
+      Led by some vague unrest,
+    Some mystic hint of joys unborn
+      Springing within her breast."
+
+What takes one in "The Gates of Silence," which, of course, means the
+gates of death, are the large, sweeping views. The poet strides
+through time and space like a Colossus and
+
+                              "flings
+      Out of his spendthrift hands
+    The whirling worlds like pebbles,
+      The meshèd stars like sands."
+
+Loveman's stanzas have not the flexibility and freedom of those of
+Moody and McCarthy, but they bring in full measure the largeness of
+thought which a true poem requires.
+
+Some of Moody's poems rank with the best in the literature of his time.
+He was deeply moved by the part we played in the Spanish-American War.
+It was a war of shame and plunder from the point of view of many of the
+noblest and most patriotic men of the country. We freed Cuba from the
+Spanish yoke and left her free; but we seized the Philippines and
+subdued the native population by killing a vast number of them--more
+than half of them, some say. Commercial exploitation inspired our
+policy. How eloquently Senator Hoar of Massachusetts inveighed against
+our course! We promised the Filipinos their freedom--a promise we have
+not yet fulfilled.
+
+Moody's most notable poems are "Gloucester Moors," "An Ode in Time of
+Hesitation" (inspired by the Shaw Monument in Boston, the work of
+Saint-Gaudens), "The Brute," "The Daguerreotype," and "On a Soldier
+Fallen in the Philippines." In this last poem throb and surge the
+mingled emotions of pride and shame which the best minds in the
+country felt at the time--shame at our mercenary course, and pride in
+the fine behavior of our soldiers. It is true we made some pretense of
+indemnifying Spain by paying her twenty million dollars, which was
+much like the course of a boy who throws another boy down and
+forcibly takes his jack-knife from him, then gives him a few coppers
+to salve his wounds. I remember giving Moody's poem to Charles Eliot
+Norton (one of those who opposed the war), shortly after it appeared.
+He read it aloud with marked emotion. Let me quote two of its stanzas:
+
+          "Toll! Let the great bells toll
+          Till the clashing air is dim.
+          Did we wrong this parted soul?
+          We will make it up to him.
+          Toll! Let him never guess
+          What work we set him to.
+          Laurel, laurel, yes;
+          He did what we bade him do.
+    Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;
+    Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own
+              heart's-blood.
+
+          "A flag for the soldier's bier
+          Who dies that his land may live;
+          O, banners, banners here,
+          That he doubt not nor misgive!
+          That he heed not from the tomb
+          The evil days draw near
+          When the nation, robed in gloom,
+          With its faithless past shall strive.
+    Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island
+              mark,
+    Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in
+              the dark."
+
+When I say that every true poet must have a philosophy, I do not mean
+that he must be what is commonly called a philosophical poet; from
+such we steer clear. The philosophy in a poem must be like the iron in
+the blood. It is the iron that gives color and vigor to the blood.
+Reduce it and we become an anæmic and feeble race. Much of the popular
+poetry is anæmic in this respect. There is no virile thought in it.
+All of which amounts to saying that there is always a great nature
+back of a great poem.
+
+The various forms of verse are skillfully used by an increasing number
+of educated persons, but the number of true poets is not increasing.
+Quite the contrary, I fear. The spirit of the times in which we live
+does not favor meditation and absorption in the basic things out of
+which great poetry arises. "The world is too much with us." Yet we
+need not be too much discouraged. England has produced Masefield, and
+we have produced John Russell McCarthy, who has written the best
+nature poetry since Emerson. The genius of a race does not repeat. We
+shall never again produce poets of the type of those that are gone,
+and we should not want to. All we may hope for is to produce poets as
+original and characteristic and genuine as those of the past--poets
+who as truly express the spirit of their time, as the greater poets
+did of theirs--not Emerson and Whitman over again, but a wide
+departure from their types.
+
+Speaking of Whitman, may we not affirm that it is his tremendous and
+impassioned philosophy suffusing his work, as the blood suffuses the
+body, that keeps "Leaves of Grass" forever fresh? We do not go to
+Whitman for pretty flowers of poesy, although they are there, but we
+go to him for his attitude toward life and the universe, we go to
+stimulate and fortify our souls--in short, for his cosmic philosophy
+incarnated in a man.
+
+What largeness of thought Tennyson brings to all his themes! There is
+plenty of iron in his blood, though it be the blood of generations of
+culture, and of an overripe civilization. We cannot say as much of
+Swinburne's poetry or prose. I do not think either will live. Bigness
+of words, and fluency, and copiousness of verse cannot make up for the
+want of a sane and rational philosophy. Arnold's poems always have
+real and tangible subject matter. His "Dover Beach" is a great stroke
+of poetic genius. Let me return to Poe: what largeness of thought did
+he bring to his subjects? Emerson spoke of him as "the jingle man,"
+and Poe, in turn, spoke of Emerson with undisguised contempt. Poe's
+picture indicates a neurotic person. There is power in his eyes, but
+the shape of his head is abnormal, and a profound melancholy seems to
+rest on his very soul. What a conjurer he was with words and meters
+and measures! No substance at all in his "Raven," only shadows--a
+wonderful dance of shadows, all tricks of a verbal wizard. "The
+Bells," a really powerful poem, is his masterpiece, unique in English
+literature; but it has no intellectual content. Its appeal is to the
+eye and ear alone. It has a verbal splendor and a mastery over measure
+and rhythm far beyond anything in Shelley, or in any other poet of his
+time. It is art glorified; it is full of poetic energy. No wonder
+foreign critics see in Poe something far beyond that found in any
+other American, or in any British poet!
+
+Poe set to work to write "The Raven" as deliberately as a mechanic
+goes to work to make a machine, or an architect to build a house. It
+was all a matter of calculation with him. He did not believe in long
+poems, hence decided at the outset that his poem should not be more
+than one hundred lines in length. Then he asked himself, what is the
+legitimate end and aim of a poem? and answered emphatically, Beauty.
+The next point to settle was, what impression must be made to produce
+that effect? He decided that "melancholy is the most legitimate of all
+poetic tones." Why joy or gladness, like that of the birds, is not
+equally legitimate, he does not explain. Then, to give artistic
+piquancy to the whole, he decided that there must be "some pivot upon
+which the whole structure might turn." He found that "no one had been
+so universally employed as the refrain." The burden of the poem should
+be given by the refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should have
+brevity. Then his task was to select a single word that would be in
+keeping with the melancholy at which he was aiming, and this he found
+in the word _nevermore_. He next invented a pretext for the frequent
+but varying use of _nevermore_. This word could not be spoken in the
+right tone by a human being; it must come from an unreasoning
+creature, hence the introduction of the raven, an ill-omened bird, in
+harmony with the main tone of the poem. He then considered what was
+the most melancholy subject of mankind, and found it was death, and
+that that melancholy theme was most poetical when allied to beauty.
+Hence the death of a beautiful woman was unquestionably the most
+poetic topic in the world. It was equally beyond doubt that the lips
+best suited for such topic were those of a bereaved lover. Thus he
+worked himself up, or rather back, to the climax of the poem, for he
+wrote the last stanza, in which the climax occurs, first. His own
+analysis of the poem is like a chemist's analysis of some new compound
+he has produced; it is full of technical terms and subtle
+distinctions. Probably no other famous poem was turned out in just
+that studied and deliberate architectural way--no pretense of
+inspiration, or of "eyes in fine frenzy rolling": just skilled
+craftsmanship--only this and nothing more.
+
+Arnold's dictum that poetry is a criticism of life is, in a large and
+flexible sense, true. The poet does not criticize life as the
+conscious critic does, but as we unconsciously do in our most exalted
+moments. Arnold, I believe, did not appreciate Whitman, but one
+function of the poet upon which Whitman lays emphasis, is criticism of
+his country and times.
+
+    "What is this you bring, my America?
+    Is it uniform with my country?
+    Is it not something that has been better done or told before?
+    Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
+    Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?--is the good old cause
+              in it?
+    Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
+              literates of enemies, lands?
+    Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
+    Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
+    Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
+    Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
+              strength, gait, face?
+    Have real employments contributed to it?
+    Original makers, not mere amanuenses?"
+
+Speaking of criticism, it occurs to me how important it is that a
+poet, or any other writer, should be a critic of himself. Wordsworth,
+who was a really great poet, was great only at rare intervals. His
+habitual mood was dull and prosy. His sin was that he kept on writing
+during those moods, grinding out sonnets by the hundred--one hundred
+and thirty-two ecclesiastical sonnets, and over half as many on
+liberty, all very dull and wooden. His mill kept on grinding whether
+it had any grist of the gods to grind or not. He told Emerson he was
+never in haste to publish, but he seems to have been in haste to
+write, and wrote on all occasions, producing much dull and trivial
+work. We speak of a man's work as being heavy. Let us apply the test
+literally to Wordsworth and weigh his verse. The complete edition of
+his poems, edited by Henry Reed and published in Philadelphia in 1851,
+weighs fifty-five ounces; the selection which Matthew Arnold made from
+his complete works, and which is supposed to contain all that is worth
+preserving, weighs ten ounces. The difference represents the dead
+wood. That Wordsworth was a poor judge of his own work is seen in the
+remark he made to Emerson that he did not regard his "Tintern Abbey"
+as highly as some of the sonnets and parts of "The Excursion." I
+believe the Abbey poem is the one by which he will longest be
+remembered. "The Excursion" is a long, dull sermon. Its didacticism
+lies so heavily upon it that it has nearly crushed its poetry--like a
+stone on a flower.
+
+All poetry is true, but all truth is not poetry. When Burns treats a
+natural-history theme, as in his verses on the mouse and the daisy,
+and even on the louse, how much more there is in them than mere
+natural history! With what a broad and tender philosophy he clothes
+them! how he identifies himself with the mouse and regards himself as
+its fellow mortal! So have Emerson's "Titmouse" and "Humble-Bee" a
+better excuse for being than their natural history. So have McCarthy's
+"For a Bunny" and "The Snake," and "To a Worm."
+
+THE SNAKE
+
+    Poor unpardonable length,
+    All belly to the mouth,
+    Writhe then and wriggle,
+    If there's joy in it!
+
+    _My_ heel, at least, shall spare you.
+
+    A little sun on a stone,
+    A mouse or two,
+    And all that unreasonable belly
+    Is happy.
+
+    No wonder God wasn't satisfied--
+    And went on creating.
+
+TO A WORM
+
+    Do you know you are green, little worm,
+    Like the leaf you feed on?
+    Perhaps it is on account of the birds, who would like to eat you.
+    But is there any reason why they shouldn't eat you, little worm?
+
+    Do you know you are comical, little worm?
+    How you double yourself up and wave your head,
+    And then stretch out and double up again,
+    All after a little food.
+
+    Do you know you have a long, strange name, little worm?
+    I will not tell you what it is.
+    That is for men of learning.
+    You--and God--do not care about such things.
+
+WHAT MAKES A POEM?
+
+    You would wave about and double up just as much, and be just as
+              futile, with it as without it.
+    Why do you crawl about on the top of that post, little worm?
+    It should have been a tree, eh? with green leaves for eating.
+    But it isn't, and you have crawled about it all day, looking for a new
+              brown branch, or a green leaf.
+    Do you know anything about tears, little worm?
+
+Or take McCarthy's lines to the honey bee:
+
+    "Poor desolate betrayer of Pan's trust,
+    Who turned from mating and the sweets thereof,
+    To make of labor an eternal lust,
+    And with pale thrift destroy the red of love,
+    The curse of Pan has sworn your destiny.
+    Unloving, unbeloved, you go your way
+    Toiling forever, and unwittingly
+    You bear love's precious burden every day
+    From flower to flower (for your blasphemy),
+    Poor eunuch, making flower lovers gay."
+
+Or this:
+
+GODLINESS
+
+    I know a man who says
+    That he gets godliness out of a book.
+
+    He told me this as we sought arbutus
+    On the April hills--
+    Little color-poems of God
+    Lilted to us from the ground,
+    Lyric blues and whites and pinks.
+    We climbed great rocks,
+    Eternally chanting their gray elegies,
+    And all about, the cadenced hills
+    Were proud
+    With the stately green epic of the Almighty.
+
+    And then we walked home under the stars,
+    While he kept telling me about his book
+    And the godliness in it.
+
+There are many great lyrics in our literature which have no palpable
+or deducible philosophy; but they are the utterance of deep, serious,
+imaginative natures, and they reach our minds and hearts. Wordsworth's
+"Daffodils," his "Cuckoo," his "Skylark," and scores of others, live
+because they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds and flowers
+themselves.
+
+Such a poem as Gray's "Elegy" holds its own, and will continue to hold
+it, because it puts in pleasing verse form the universal human emotion
+which all persons feel more or less when gazing upon graves.
+
+The intellectual content of Scott's poems is not great but the human and
+emotional content in them is great. A great minstrel of the border
+speaks in them. The best that Emerson could say of Scott was that "he is
+the delight of generous boys," but the spirit of romance offers as
+legitimate a field for the poet as does the spirit of transcendentalism,
+though yielding, of course, different human values.
+
+Every poet of a high order has a deep moral nature, and yet the poet
+is far from being a mere moralist--
+
+    "A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
+    An intellectual all-in-all."
+
+Every true poem is an offering upon the altar of art; it exists to no
+other end; it teaches as nature teaches; it is good as nature is
+good; its art is the art of nature; it brings our spirits in closer
+and more loving contact with the universe; it is for the edification
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS
+
+THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT
+
+
+The clouds are transient, but the sky is permanent. The petals of a
+flowering plant are transient, the leaves and fruit are less so, and
+the roots the least transient of all. The dew on the grass is
+transient, as is the frost of an autumn morning. The snows and the
+rains abide longer. The splendors of summer and sunrise and sunset
+soon pass, but the glory of the day lasts. The rainbow vanishes in a
+few moments, but the prismatic effect of the drops of rain is a law of
+optics. Colors fade while texture is unimpaired.
+
+Of course change marks everything, living or dead. Even the pole star
+in astronomic time will vanish. But consider things mundane only. How
+the rocks on the seacoast seem to defy and withstand the waves that
+beat against them! "Weak as is a breaking wave" is a line of
+Wordsworth's. Yet the waves remain after the rocks are gone. The sea
+knows no change as the land does. It and the sky are the two
+unchanging earth features.
+
+In our own lives how transient are our moments of inspiration, our
+morning joy, our ecstasies of the spirit! Upon how much in the world
+of art, literature, invention, modes, may be written the word
+"perishable"! "All flesh is grass," says the old Book. Individuals,
+species, races, pass. Life alone remains and is immortal.
+
+POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE
+
+Positive and negative go hand in hand through the world. Victory and
+defeat, hope and despair, pleasure and pain. Man is positive, woman is
+negative in comparison. The day is positive, the night is negative.
+But it is a pleasure to remember that it is always day in the
+universe.
+
+The shadow of the earth does not extend very far, nor the shadow of
+any other planet. Day is the great cosmic fact. The masses of men are
+negative to the few master and compelling minds. Cold is negative,
+heat is positive, though the difference is only one of degree. The
+negative side of life, the side of meditation, reflection, and
+reverie, is no less important than the side of action and performance.
+Youth is positive, age is negative. Age says No where it used to say
+Yes. It takes in sail. Life's hurry and heat are over, the judgment is
+calm, the passions subdued, the stress of effort relaxed. Our temper
+is less aggressive, events seem less imminent.
+
+The morning is positive; in the evening we muse and dream and take our
+ease, we see our friends, we unstring the bow, we indulge our social
+instincts.
+
+Optimism is positive, pessimism is negative. Fear, suspicion,
+distrust--are all negative.
+
+On the seashore where I write[4] I see the ebbing tide, the exposed
+sand and rocks, the receding waves; and I know the sea is showing us
+its negative side; there is a lull in the battle. But wait a little
+and the mad assault of the waves upon the land will be renewed.
+
+[Footnote 4: La Jolla, California.]
+
+PALM AND FIST
+
+The palm is for friendship, hospitality, and good will; the fist is to
+smite the enemies of truth and justice.
+
+How many men are like the clenched fist--pugnacious, disputatious,
+quarrelsome, always spoiling for a fight; a verbal fisticuff, if not a
+physical one, is their delight. Others are more conciliatory and
+peace-loving, not forgetting that a soft answer turneth away wrath.
+Roosevelt was the man of the clenched fist; not one to stir up strife,
+but a merciless hitter in what he believed a just cause. He always had
+the fighting edge, yet could be as tender and sympathetic as any one.
+This latter side of him is clearly shown in his recently published
+"Letters to His Children." Lincoln was, in contrast, the man with the
+open palm, tempering justice with kindness, and punishment with
+leniency. His War Secretary, Stanton, wielded the hard fist.
+
+PRAISE AND FLATTERY
+
+"More men know how to flatter," said Wendell Phillips, "than how to
+praise." To flatter is easy, to condemn is easy, but to praise
+judiciously and discriminatingly is not easy. Extravagant praise
+defeats itself, as does extravagant blame. A man is rarely overpraised
+during his own time by his own people. If he is an original, forceful
+character, he is much more likely to be overblamed than overpraised.
+He disturbs old ways and institutions. We require an exalted point of
+view to take in a great character, as we do to take in a great
+mountain.
+
+We are likely to overpraise and overblame our presidents. Lincoln was
+greatly overblamed in his day, but we have made it up to his memory.
+President Wilson won the applause of both political parties during his
+first term, but how overwhelmingly did the tide turn against him
+before the end of his second term! All his high and heroic service
+(almost his martyrdom) in the cause of peace, and for the league to
+prevent war, were forgotten in a mad rush of the populace to the other
+extreme. But Wilson will assuredly come to his own in time, and take
+his place among the great presidents.
+
+A little of the Scottish moderation is not so bad; it is always safe.
+A wise man will always prefer unjust blame to fulsome praise. Extremes
+in the estimation of a sound character are bound sooner or later to
+correct themselves. Wendell Phillips himself got more than his share
+of blame during the antislavery days, but the praise came in due time.
+
+GENIUS AND TALENT
+
+The difference between the two is seen in nothing more clearly than in
+the fact that so many educated persons can and do write fairly good
+verse, in fact, write most of the popular newspaper and magazine
+poetry, while only those who have a genius for poetry write real
+poems. Could mere talent have written Bryant's lines "To a Waterfowl"?
+or his "Thanatopsis"? or "June"? Or the small volume of selections of
+great poetry which Arnold made from the massive works of Wordsworth?
+
+Talent could have produced a vast deal of Wordsworth's work--all the
+"Ecclesiastical Sonnets" and much of "The Excursion." Could talent
+have written Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"? It could have produced
+all that Whitman wrote before that time--all his stories and poems.
+Give talent inspiration and it becomes genius. The grub is
+metamorphosed into the butterfly.
+
+"To do what is impossible to Talent is the mark of Genius," says
+Amiel.
+
+Talent may judge, Genius creates. Talent keeps the rules, Genius knows
+when to break them.
+
+"You may know Genius," says the ironical Swift, "by this sign: All the
+dunces are against him."
+
+There is fine talent in Everett's oration at Gettysburg, but what a
+different quality spoke in Lincoln's brief but immortal utterance on
+the same occasion! Is anything more than bright, alert talent shown in
+the mass of Lowell's work, save perhaps in his "Biglow Papers"? If he
+had a genius for poetry, though he wrote much, I cannot see it. His
+tone, as Emerson said, is always that of prose. The "Cathedral" is a
+_tour de force_. The line of his so often quoted--"What is so rare as
+a day in June?"--is a line of prose.
+
+The lines "To a Honey Bee" by John Russell McCarthy are the true gold
+of poetry. "To make of labor an eternal lust" could never have been
+struck off by mere talent.
+
+INVENTION AND DISCOVERY
+
+Columbus discovered America; Edison invented the phonograph, the
+incandescent light, and many other things. If Columbus had not
+discovered America, some other voyager would have. If Harvey had not
+discovered the circulation of the blood, some one else would have. The
+wonder is that it was not discovered ages before. So far as I know, no
+one has yet discovered the function of the spleen, but doubtless in
+time some one will. It is only comparatively recently that the
+functions of other ductless glands have been discovered. What did we
+know about the thyroid gland a half-century ago? All the new
+discoveries in the heavens waited upon the new astronomic methods, and
+the end is not yet. Many things in nature are still like an unexplored
+land. New remedies for the ills of the human body doubtless remain to
+be found. In the mechanical world probably no new principle remains to
+be discovered. "Keely" frauds have had their day. In the chemical
+world, the list of primary elements will probably not be added to,
+though new combinations of these elements may be almost endless. In
+the biological world, new species of insects, birds, and mammals
+doubtless remain to be discovered. Our knowledge of the natural
+history of the globe is far from being complete.
+
+But in regard to inventions the case is different. I find myself
+speculating on such a question as this: If Edison had never been born,
+should we ever have had the phonograph, or the incandescent light? If
+Graham Bell had died in infancy, should we ever have had the
+telephone? Or without Marconi should we have had the wireless, or
+without Morse, the telegraph? Or, to go back still farther, without
+Franklin should we ever have known the identity of lightning and
+electricity? Who taught us how to control electricity and make it do
+our work? One of the questions of Job was, "Canst thou send
+lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" Yes, we
+can. "We are ready to do your bidding," they seem to say, "to run your
+errands, to carry your burdens, to grind your grist, to light your
+houses, to destroy your enemies."
+
+The new inventions that the future holds for us wait upon the new man.
+The discovery of radium--what a secret that was! But in all
+probability had not Curie and his wife discovered it, some other
+investigator would.
+
+Shall we ever learn how to use the atomic energy that is locked up in
+matter? Or how to use the uniform temperature of the globe? Or the
+secret of the glow-worm and firefly--light without heat?
+
+The laws of the conservation of energy and of the correlation of
+forces were discoveries. The art of aviation was both an invention and
+a discovery. The soaring hawks and eagles we have always been familiar
+with; the Wright brothers invented the machine that could do the
+trick.
+
+"Necessity is the mother of invention." As our wants increase, new
+devices to meet them appear. How the diving-bell answered a real need!
+The motor-car also, and the flying-machine. The sewing-machine is a
+great time-saver; the little hooks in our shoes in place of eyelets
+are great time-savers; pins, and friction matches, and rubber
+overshoes, and scores on scores of other inventions answer to real
+needs. Necessity did not call the phonograph into being, nor the
+incandescent light, but the high explosives, dynamite and T. N. T.
+(trinitrotoluol) met real wants.
+
+The Great War with its submarines stimulated inventors to devise
+weapons to cope with them. Always as man's hand and eyes and ears have
+needed reënforcing or extending, his wit has come to his rescue. In
+fact, his progress has been contingent upon this very fact. His
+necessities and his power of invention react upon one another; the
+more he invents, the more he wants, and the more he wants, the more he
+invents.
+
+TOWN AND COUNTRY
+
+I was saying to myself, why do not all literary men go to the country
+to do their work, where they can have health, peace, and solitude?
+Then it occurred to me that there are many men of many minds, and that
+many need to be in the thick of life; they get more stimulus out of
+people than out of nature. The novelist especially needs to be in
+touch with multitudes of men and women. But the poet and the
+philosopher will usually prosper better in the country. A man like
+myself, who is an observer and of a meditative cast, does better in
+the country. Emerson, though city born and bred, finally settled in
+the country. Whitman, on the other hand, loved "populous pavements."
+But he was at home anywhere under the stars. He had no study, no
+library, no club, other than the street, the beach, the hilltop, and
+the marts of men. Mr. Howells was country-born, but came to the city
+for employment and remained there. Does not one wish that he had gone
+back to his Ohio boyhood home? It was easy for me to go back because I
+came of generations of farmer folk. The love of the red soil was in my
+blood. My native hills looked like the faces of my father and mother.
+I could never permanently separate myself from them. I have always had
+a kind of chronic homesickness. Two or three times a year I must
+revisit the old scenes. I have had a land-surveyor make a map of the
+home farm, and I have sketched in and colored all the different fields
+as I knew them in my youth. I keep the map hung up in my room here in
+California, and when I want to go home, I look at this map. I do not
+see the paper. I see fields and woods and stone walls and paths and
+roads and grazing cattle. In this field I used to help make hay; in
+this one I wore my fingers sore picking up stones for these stone
+walls; in this I planted corn and potatoes with my brothers. In these
+maple woods I helped make sugar in the spring; in these I killed my
+first ruffed grouse. In this field I did my first ploughing, with
+thoughts of an academy in a neighboring town at the end of every
+furrow. In this one I burned the dry and decayed stumps in the April
+days, with my younger brother, and a spark set his cap on fire. In
+this orchard I helped gather the apples in October. In this barn we
+husked the corn in the November nights. In this one Father sheared the
+sheep, and Mother picked the geese. My paternal grandfather cleared
+these fields and planted this orchard. I recall the hired man who
+worked for us during my time, and every dog my father had, and my
+adventures with them, hunting wood-chucks and coons. All these things
+and memories have been valuable assets in my life. But it is well that
+not all men have my strong local attachments. The new countries would
+never get settled. My forefathers would never have left Connecticut
+for the wilderness of the Catskills.
+
+As a rule, however, we are a drifting, cosmopolitan people. We are
+easily transplanted; we do not strike our roots down into the geology
+of long-gone time.
+
+I often wonder how so many people of the Old World can pull
+themselves up and migrate to America and never return. The Scots,
+certainly a home-loving race, do it, and do not seem to suffer from
+homesickness.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+DAY BY DAY
+
+
+We often hear it said of a man that he was born too early, or too
+late, but is it ever true? If he is behind his times, would he not
+have been behind at whatever period he had been born? If he is ahead
+of his times, is not the same thing true? In the vegetable world the
+early flowers and fruit blossoms are often cut off by the frost, but
+not so in the world of man. Babies are in order at any time. Is a
+poet, or a philosopher, ever born too late? or too early? If Emerson
+had been born a century earlier, his heterodoxy would have stood in
+his way; but in that case he would not have been a heretic. Whitman
+would have had to wait for a hearing at whatever period he was born.
+He said he was willing to wait for the growth of the taste for
+himself, and it finally came. Emerson's first thin volume called
+"Nature" did not sell the first edition of five hundred copies in ten
+years, but would it have been different at any other time? A piece of
+true literature is not superseded. The fame of man may rise and fall,
+but it lasts. Was Watt too early with his steam-engine, or Morse too
+early with his telegraph? Or Bell too early with his telephone? Or
+Edison with his phonograph or his incandescent light? Or the Wright
+brothers with their flying-machine? Or Henry Ford with his motor-car?
+Before gasolene was discovered they would have been too early, but
+then their inventions would not have materialized.
+
+The world moves, and great men are the springs of progress. But no man
+is born too soon or too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fadeless flower is no flower at all. How Nature ever came to produce
+one is a wonder. Would not paper flowers do as well?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The most memorable days in our lives are the days when we meet a great
+man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How stealthy and silent a thing is that terrible power which we have
+under control in our homes, yet which shakes the heavens in thunder!
+It comes and goes as silently as a spirit. In fact, it is nearer a
+spirit than anything else known to us. We touch a button and here it
+is, like an errand-boy who appears with his cap in his hand and meekly
+asks, "What will you have?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few days ago I was writing of meteoric men. But are we not all like
+meteors that cut across the sky and are quickly swallowed up by the
+darkness--some of us leaving a trail that lasts a little longer than
+others, but all gone in a breath?
+
+Our great pulpit orator Beecher, how little he left that cold print
+does not kill! As a young man I used nearly to run my legs off to get
+to Plymouth Church before the doors were closed. Under his
+trumpet-like voice I was like a reed bent by the wind, but now when in
+a book made up of quotations I see passages from his sermons, they
+seem thin and flimsy. Beecher's oratory was all for the ear and not
+for the eye and mind. In truth, is the world indebted to the pulpit
+for much good literature? Robertson's sermons can be read in the
+library, and there are others of the great English divines. But
+oratory is action and passion. "Great volumes of animal heat," Emerson
+names as one of the qualities of the orator.
+
+The speeches of Wendell Phillips will bear print because his oratory
+was of the quiet, conversational kind. Webster's, of course, stand the
+test of print, but do Clay's or Calhoun's? In our time oratory, as
+such, has about gone out. Rarely now do we hear the eagle scream in
+Congress or on the platform. Men aim to speak earnestly and
+convincingly, but not oratorically. President Wilson is a very
+convincing speaker, but he indulges in no oratory. The one who makes a
+great effort to be eloquent always fails. Noise and fury and
+over-emphasis are not eloquent. "True eloquence," says Pascal,
+"scorns eloquence."
+
+There is no moral law in nature, but there is that out of which the
+moral law arose. There is no answer to prayer in the heavens above, or
+in the earth beneath, except in so far as the attitude of sincere
+prayer is a prophecy of the good it pleads for. Prayer for peace of
+mind, for charity, for gratitude, for light, for courage, is answered
+in the sincere asking. Prayer for material good is often prayer
+against wind and tide, but wind and tide obey those who can rule them.
+
+Our ethical standards injected into world-history lead to confusion
+and contradiction. Introduced into the jungle, they would put an end
+to life there; introduced into the sea, they would put an end to life
+there; the rule that it is more blessed to give than to receive would
+put an end to all competitive business. Our ethical standards are
+narrow, artificial, and apply only to civilized communities. Nations
+have rarely observed them till the present day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If the world is any better for my having lived in it, it is because I
+have pointed the way to a sane and happy life on terms within reach of
+all, in my love and joyous acceptance of the works of Nature about me.
+I have not tried, as the phrase is, to lead my readers from Nature up
+to Nature's God, because I cannot separate the one from the other. If
+your heart warms toward the visible creation, and toward your fellow
+men, you have the root of the matter in you. The power we call God
+does not sustain a mechanical or secondary relation to the universe,
+but is vital in it, or one with it. To give this power human
+lineaments and attributes, as our fathers did, only limits and
+belittles it. And to talk of leading from Nature up to Nature's God is
+to miss the God that throbs in every spear of grass and vibrates in
+the wing of every insect that hums. The Infinite is immanent in this
+universe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The faith that truth exists" is the way that William James begins one
+of his sentences. Of course truth exists where the mind of man exists.
+A new man and there is new truth. Truth, in this sense, is a way of
+looking at things that is agreeable, or that gives satisfaction to the
+human mind. Truth is not a definite fixed quantity, like the gold or
+silver of a country. It is no more a fixed quantity than is beauty. It
+is an experience of the human mind. Beauty and truth are what we make
+them. We say the world is full of beauty. What we mean is that the
+world is full of things that give us the pleasure, or awaken in us the
+sentiment which we call by that name.
+
+The broadest truths are born of the broadest minds. Narrow minds are
+so named from their narrow views of things.
+
+Pilate's question, "What is Truth?" sets the whole world by the ears.
+The question of right and wrong is another thing. Such questions refer
+to action and the conduct of our lives. In religion, in politics, in
+economics, in sociology, what is truth to one man may be error to
+another. We may adopt a course of action because it seems the more
+expedient. Debatable questions have two sides to them. In the moral
+realm that is true which is agreeable to the largest number of
+competent judges. A mind that could see further and deeper might
+reverse all our verdicts. To be right on any question in the moral
+realm is to be in accord with that which makes for the greatest good
+to the greatest number. In our Civil War the South believed itself
+right in seceding from the Union; the North, in fighting to preserve
+the Union. Both sections now see that the North had the larger right.
+The South was sectional, the North national. Each of the great
+political parties thinks it has a monopoly of the truth, but the truth
+usually lies midway between them. Questions of right and wrong do not
+necessarily mean questions of true and false. "There is nothing either
+good or bad," says Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." This may be
+good Christian Science doctrine, but it is doubtful philosophy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yesterday, as I stood on the hill above Slabsides and looked over the
+landscape dotted with farms just greening in the April sun, the
+thought struck me afresh that all this soil, all the fertile fields,
+all these leagues on leagues of sloping valleys and rolling hills came
+from the decay of the rocks, and that the chief agent in bringing
+about this decay and degradation was the gentle rain from heaven--that
+without the rain through the past geologic ages, the scene I looked
+upon would have been only one wild welter of broken or crumpled rocky
+strata, not a green thing, not a living thing, should I have seen.
+
+In the Hawaiian Islands one may have proof of this before his eyes. On
+one end of the island of Maui, the rainfall is very great, and its
+deep valleys and high sharp ridges are clothed with tropical verdure,
+while on the other end, barely ten miles away, rain never falls, and
+the barren, rocky desolation which the scene presents I can never
+forget. No rain, no soil; no soil, no life.
+
+We are, therefore, children of the rocks; the rocks are our mother,
+and the rains our father.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the stream of life, through some favoring condition, breaks
+through its natural checks and bounds, and inundates and destroys
+whole provinces of other forms, as when the locusts, the
+forest-worms, the boll-weevil, the currant-worm, the potato beetle,
+unduly multiply and devastate fields and forests and the farmer's
+crops, what do we witness but Nature's sheer excess and intemperance?
+Life as we usually see it is the result of a complex system of checks
+and counter-checks. The carnivorous animals are a check on the
+herbivorous; the hawks and owls are a check on the birds and fowls;
+the cats and weasels are a check on the small rodents, which are very
+prolific. The different species of plants and trees are a check upon
+one another.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I think the main reason of the abundance of wealth in the country is
+that every man, equipped as he is with so many modern scientific
+appliances and tools, is multiplied four or five times. He is equal to
+that number of men in his capacity to do things as compared with the
+men of fifty or seventy years ago. The farmer, with his
+mowing-machine, his horse-rake, his automobile, his tractor engine and
+gang ploughs or his sulky ploughs, his hay-loader, his corn-planter,
+and so on, does the work of many men. Machinery takes the place of
+men. Gasolene and kerosene oil give man a great advantage. Dynamite,
+too,--what a giant that is in his service! The higher cost of living
+does not offset this advantage.
+
+The condition in Europe at this time is quite different: there the
+energies of men have been directed not to the accumulation of wealth,
+but to the destruction of wealth. Hence, while the war has enriched
+us, it has impoverished Europe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why are women given so much more to ornaments and superfluities in
+dress and finery than men? In the animal kingdom below man, save in a
+few instances, it is the male that wears the showy decorations. The
+male birds have the bright plumes; the male sheep have the big horns;
+the stag has the antlers; the male lion has the heavy mane; the male
+firefly has wings and carries the lamp. With the barnyard fowl the
+male has the long spurs and the showy comb and wattles. In the crow
+tribe, the male cannot be distinguished from the female, nor among the
+fly-catchers, nor among the snipes and plovers. But when we come to
+the human species, and especially among the white races, the female
+fairly runs riot in ornamentation. If it is not to attract the male,
+what is it for? It has been pretty clearly shown that what Darwin
+calls "sexual selection" plays no part. Woman wishes to excite the
+passion of love. She has an instinct for motherhood; the perpetuity of
+the species is at the bottom of it all. Woman knows how to make her
+dress alluring, how to make it provocative, how much to reveal, how
+much to conceal. A certain voluptuousness is the ambition of all
+women; anything but to be skinny and raw-boned. She does not want to
+be muscular and flat-chested, nor, on the other hand, to be
+over-stout, but she prays for the flowing lines and the plumpness that
+belong to youth. A lean man does not repel her, nor a rugged, bony
+frame. Woman's garments are of a different texture and on a different
+scale than those of man, and much more hampering. Her ruffles and
+ribbons and laces all play their part. Her stockings even are a vital
+problem, more important than her religion. We do not care where she
+worships if her dress is attractive. Emerson reports that a lady said
+to him that a sense of being well-dressed at church gave a
+satisfaction which religion could not give.
+
+With man the male defends and safeguards the female. True that among
+savage tribes he makes a slave of her, but in the white races he will
+defend her with his life. She does not take up arms, she does not go
+to sea. She does not work in mines, or as a rule engage in the rough
+work of the world. In Europe she works in the field, and we have had
+farmerettes in this country, but I know of no feminine engineers or
+carpenters or stone masons. There have been a few women explorers and
+Alpine climbers, and investigators in science, but only a few. The
+discovery of radium is chiefly accredited to a woman, and women have a
+few valuable inventions to their credit. I saw a valuable and
+ingenious machine, in a great automobile factory, that was invented by
+a woman. Now that woman has won the franchise in this country, we are
+waiting to see if politics will be purified.
+
+The "weaker sex," surely. How much easier do women cry than men! how
+much more easily are they scared! And yet, how much more pain they can
+endure! And how much more devoted are they to their children!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why does any extended view from a mountain-top over a broad landscape,
+no matter what the features of that landscape, awaken in us the
+emotion of the beautiful? Is it because the eye loves a long range, a
+broad sweep? Or do we have a sense of victory? The book of the
+landscape is now open before us, and we can read it page after page.
+All these weary miles where we tramped, and where the distance, as it
+were, was in ambush, we now command at a glance. Big views expand the
+mind as deep inhalations of air expand the lungs.
+
+Yesterday I stood on the top of Grossmont,[5] probably a thousand feet
+above the landscape, and looked out over a wide expanse of what seemed
+to be parched, barren country; a few artificial lakes or ponds of
+impounded rains, but not a green thing in sight, and yet I was filled
+with pleasurable emotion. I lingered and lingered and gazed and gazed.
+The eye is freed at such times, like a caged bird, and darts far and
+near without hindrance.
+
+[Footnote 5: In San Diego County, California.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "The wings of time are black and white,
+    Pied with morning and with night."
+
+Thus do we objectify that which has no objective existence, but is
+purely a subjective experience. Do we objectify light and sound in the
+same way? No. One can conceive of the vibrations in the ether that
+give us the sensation of light, and in the air that give us sound.
+These vibrations do not depend upon our organs. Time and tide, we say,
+wait for no man. Certainly the tide does not, as it has a real
+objective existence. But time does not wait or hurry. It neither lags
+nor hastens. Yesterday does not exist, nor to-morrow, nor the Now, for
+that matter. Before we can say the moment has come, it is gone. The
+only change there is is in our states of consciousness. How the hours
+lag when we are waiting for a train, and how they hurry when we are
+happily employed! Can we draw a line between the past and the present?
+Can you find a point in the current of the stream that is stationary?
+We speak of being lavish of time and of husbanding time, of improving
+time, and so on. We divide it into seconds and minutes, hours and
+days, weeks, and months, and years. Civilized man is compelled to do
+this; he lives and works by schedule, but it is his states of
+consciousness that he divides and measures. "Time is but a stream I go
+fishing in," says Thoreau. The stream goes by, but the fish stay. The
+river of Time, the tooth of Time--happy comparisons.
+
+"I wasted time and now time wastes me," says Shakespeare. "I have no
+time." "You have all there is," replied the old Indian.
+
+If time, like money, could be hoarded up, we could get all our work
+done. Is there any time outside of man? The animals take no note of
+time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That is a good saying of Juvenal's, "He who owns the soil, owns up to
+the sky." So is this of Virgil's, "Command large fields, but cultivate
+small ones."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Can there be any theory or doctrine not connected with our practical
+lives so absurd that it will not be accepted as true by many people?
+How firmly was a belief in witchcraft held by whole populations for a
+generation! My grandfather believed in it, and in spooks and
+hobgoblins.
+
+The belief in alchemy still prevails--that the baser metals, by the
+aid of the philosopher's stone, can be transmuted into gold and
+silver. Quite recently there was a school in a large town in
+California for teaching alchemy. As it was a failure, its professor
+was involved in litigation with his pupils. I believe the pupils were
+chiefly women.
+
+There is a sect in Florida that believe that we live on the inside of
+a hollow sphere, instead of on the outside of a revolving globe. I
+visited the community with Edison, near Fort Myers, several years ago.
+Some of the women were fine-looking. One old lady looked like Martha
+Washington, but the men all looked "as if they had a screw loose
+somewhere." They believe that the sun and moon and all the starry
+hosts of heaven revolve on the inside of this hollow sphere. All our
+astronomy goes by the board. They look upon it as puerile and
+contemptible. The founder of the sect had said he would rise from the
+dead to confirm its truth. His disciples kept his body till the Board
+of Health obliged them to bury it.
+
+If any one were seriously to urge that we really walk on our heads
+instead of our heels, and cite our baldness as proof, there are
+persons who would believe him. It has been urged that flight to the
+moon in an aëroplane is possible--the want of air is no hindrance! The
+belief in perpetual motion is not yet dead. Many believe that snakes
+charm birds. But it has been found that a stuffed snake-skin will
+"charm" birds also--the bird is hypnotized by its own fear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What has become of the hermits?--men and women who preferred to live
+alone, holding little or no intercourse with their fellows? In my
+youth I knew of several such. There was old Ike Keator, who lived in a
+little unpainted house beside the road near the top of the mountain
+where we passed over into Batavia Kill. He lived there many years. He
+had a rich brother, a farmer in the valley below. Then there was Eri
+Gray, who lived to be over one hundred years. He occupied a little
+house on the side of a mountain, and lived, it was said, like the pigs
+in the pen. Then there was Aunt Deborah Bouton, who lived in a little
+house by a lonely road and took care of her little farm and her four
+or five cows, winter and summer. Since I have lived here on the Hudson
+there was a man who lived alone in an old stone house amid great filth
+on the top of the hill above Esopus village.
+
+In my own line of descent there was a Kelley who lived alone in a hut
+in the woods, not far from Albany. I myself must have a certain amount
+of solitude, but I love to hear the hum of life all about me. I like
+to be secluded in a building warmed by the presence of other persons.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I was a boy on the old farm, the bright, warm, midsummer days
+were canopied with the mellow hum of insects. You did not see them or
+distinguish any one species, but the whole upper air resounded like a
+great harp. It was a very marked feature of midday. But not for fifty
+years have I heard that sound. I have pressed younger and sharper ears
+into my service, but to no purpose: there are certainly fewer
+bumblebees than of old, but not fewer flies or wasps or hornets or
+honey bees. What has wrought the change I do not know.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If the movements going on around us in inert matter could be magnified
+so as to come within range of our unaided vision, how agitated the
+world would seem! The so-called motionless bodies are all vibrating
+and shifting their places day and night at all seasons. The rocks are
+sliding down the hills or creeping out of their beds, the stone walls
+are reeling and toppling, the houses are settling or leaning. All
+inert material raised by the hand of man above the earth's surface is
+slowly being pulled down to a uniform level. The crust of the earth is
+rising or subsiding. The very stars in the constellations are shifting
+their places.
+
+If we could see the molecular and chemical changes and transformations
+that are going on around us, another world of instability would be
+revealed to us. Here we should see real miracles. We should see the
+odorless gases unite to form water. We should see the building of
+crystals, catalysis, and the movements of unstable compounds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Think of what Nature does with varying degrees of temperature--solids,
+fluids, gases. From the bottom to the top of the universe means simply
+more or less heat. It seems like a misuse of words to say that iron
+freezes at a high temperature, that a bar of red-hot or white-hot iron
+is frozen. Water freezes at a high temperature, the air freezes at a
+vastly lower. Carbon dioxide becomes a solid at a very low
+temperature. Hydrogen becomes a liquid at 252° below zero centigrade,
+and a solid at 264°. The gas fluorine becomes a liquid at 210° below
+zero centigrade.
+
+In a world of absolute zero everything would be as solid as the rocks,
+all life, all chemical reactions would cease. All forms of water are
+the result of more or less heat. The circuit of the waters from the
+earth to the clouds and back again, which keeps all the machinery of
+life a-going, is the work of varying degrees of temperature. The Gulf
+Stream, which plays such a part in the climate of Europe, is the
+result of the heat in the Gulf of Mexico. The glacial periods which
+have so modified the surface of the earth in the past were the result
+of temperature changes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How habitually we speak of beauty as a positive thing, just as we do
+of truth! whereas what we call beauty is only an emotional experience
+of our own minds, just as light and heat are sensations of our bodies.
+There is no light where there is no eye, and no sound where there is
+no ear. One is a vibration in the ether, and the other a vibration in
+the air. The vibrations are positive. We do not all see beauty in the
+same things. One man is unmoved where another is thrilled. We say the
+world is full of beauty, when we mean that it is full of objects that
+excite this emotion in our minds.
+
+We speak of truth as if it, too, were a positive thing, and as if
+there were a fixed quantity of it in the world, as there is of gold or
+silver, or diamonds. Truth, again, is an intellectual emotion of the
+human mind. One man's truth is another man's falsehood--moral and
+æsthetic truth, I mean. Objective truth (mathematics and science) must
+be the same to all men.
+
+A certain mode of motion in the molecules of matter gives us the
+sensation of heat, but heat is not a thing, an entity in itself, any
+more than cold is. Yet to our senses one seems just as positive as the
+other.
+
+New truth means a new man. There are as many kinds of truth as there
+are human experiences and temperaments.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How adaptive is animal life! It adds a new touch of interest to the
+forbidding cactus to know that the cactus wren builds her nest between
+its leaves. The spines probably serve to protect the bird from her
+enemies. But are they not also a menace to her and to her young? But
+this "procreant cradle" of a bird in the arms of the fanged desert
+growth softens its aspect a little.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tree of forbidden fruit--the Tree of Knowledge--how copiously has
+mankind eaten of it during these latter generations!--and the chaotic
+state of the world to-day is the result. We have been forcing Nature's
+hand on a tremendous scale. We have gained more knowledge and power
+than we can legitimately use. We are drunk with the sense of power. We
+challenge the very gods. The rapid increase of inventions and the
+harnessing of the powers of Nature have set all nations to
+manufacturing vastly more goods than they can use and they all become
+competitors for world markets, and rivalries and jealousies spring up,
+and the seeds of war are planted. The rapid growth of towns and cities
+is one of the results. The sobering and humanizing influence of the
+country and the farm are less and less in evidence; the excitement,
+the excesses, the intoxication of the cities are more and more. The
+follies and extravagances of wealth lead to the insolence and
+rebellion of the poor. Material power! Drunk with this power, the
+world is running amuck to-day. We have got rid of kings and despots
+and autocratic governments; now if we could only keep sober and make
+democracy safe and enjoyable! Too much science has brought us to
+grief. Behold what Chemistry has done to put imperial power in our
+hands during the last decade!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The grand movements of history and of mankind are like the movements
+of nature, under the same law, elemental, regardless of waste and ruin
+and delays--not the result of human will or design, but of forces we
+wot not of. They are of the same order as floods, tornadoes,
+earthquakes, a release of human forces that have slumbered. The chaos
+of Europe to-day shows the play of such elemental forces, unorganized,
+at cross-purposes, antagonistic, fighting it out in the attempt to
+find an equilibrium. The pain, the suffering, the waste, the delays,
+do not trouble the gods at all. Since man is a part of nature, why
+should not masses of men be ruled by natural law? The human will
+reaches but a little way.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+GLEANINGS
+
+
+I do not believe that one poet can or does efface another, as Arnold
+suggests. As every gas is a vacuum to every other gas, so every new
+poet is a vacuum to every other poet. Wordsworth told Arnold that for
+many years his poems did not bring him enough to buy his shoestrings.
+The reading public had to acquire a taste for him. Whitman said, "I am
+willing to wait for the growth of the taste of myself." A man who
+likes a poet of real worth is going to continue to like him, no matter
+what new man appears. He may not read him over and over, but he goes
+back to him when the mood is upon him. We listen to the same music
+over and over. We take the same walk over and over. We read
+Shakespeare over and over, and we go back to the best in Wordsworth
+over and over. We get in Tennyson what we do not get in Wordsworth,
+and we as truly get in Wordsworth what we do not get in Tennyson.
+Tennyson was sumptuous and aristocratic. Byron found his audience, but
+he did not rob Wordsworth.
+
+It seems to me that the preëminence of Wordsworth lies in the fact
+that he deals so entirely with concrete things--men and objects in
+nature--and floods or saturates them with moral meanings. There is no
+straining, no hair-splitting, no contortions of the oracle, but it all
+comes as naturally as the sunrise or the sunset.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Things not beautiful in themselves, or when seen near at hand, may and
+do give us the sense of beauty when seen at a distance, or in mass.
+Who has not stood on a mountain-top, and seen before him a wild,
+disorderly landscape that has nevertheless awakened in him the emotion
+of the beautiful? or that has given him the emotion of the sublime?
+Wordsworth's "Daffodils," "Three Years She Grew," "The Solitary
+Reaper," "The Rainbow," "The Butterfly," and many others are merely
+beautiful. These lines from Whitman give one the emotion of the
+sublime:
+
+    "I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
+    And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of
+              the farther systems.
+
+    "Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
+    Outward and outward and forever outward.
+
+    "My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
+    He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
+    And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them."
+
+All men may slake their thirst at the same spring of water, but all
+men cannot be thrilled or soothed by beholding the same objects of
+nature. A beautiful child captivates every one, a beautiful woman
+ravishes all eyes. On my way to the Imperial Valley, I recently drove
+across a range of California mountains that had many striking
+features. A lady asked me if I did not think them beautiful. I said,
+"No, they are hideous, but the hideous may be interesting."
+
+The snow is beautiful to many persons, but it is not so to me. It is
+the color of death. I could stand our northern winters very well if I
+could always see the face of the brown or ruddy earth. The snow, I
+know, blankets the fields; and Emerson's poem on the snowstorm is
+fine; at the same time, I would rather not be obliged to look at the
+white fields.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We are the first great people without a past in the European sense. We
+are of yesterday. We do not strike our roots down deep into the
+geology of long-gone ages. We are easily transplanted. We are a
+mixture of all peoples as the other nations of the world are not. Only
+yesterday we were foreigners ourselves. Then we made the first
+experiment on a large scale of a democratic or self-governing people.
+The masses, and not a privileged few, give the tone and complexion to
+things in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly
+national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the
+highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a
+new type of man appearing in this field.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What think ye of Whitman?" This is the question I feel like putting,
+and sometimes do put, to each young poet I meet. If he thinks poorly
+of Whitman, I think poorly of him. I do not expect great things of
+him, and so far my test holds good. William Winter thought poorly of
+Whitman, Aldrich thought poorly of him, and what lasting thing has
+either of them done in poetry? The memorable things of Aldrich are in
+prose. Stedman showed more appreciation of him, and Stedman wrote two
+or three things that will keep. His "Osawatomie Brown ... he shoved
+his ramrod down" is sure of immortality. Higginson could not stand
+Whitman, and had his little fling at him whenever he got the chance.
+Who reads Higginson now? Emerson, who far outranks any other New
+England poet, was fairly swept off his feet by the first appearance of
+"Leaves of Grass." Whittier, I am told, threw the book in the fire.
+Whittier's fame has not gone far beyond New England. The scholarly and
+academic Lowell could not tolerate Whitman, and if Lowell has ever
+written any true poetry, I have not seen it. What Longfellow thought
+of him, I do not know. Thoreau saw his greatness at a glance and went
+to see him. In England, I am told, Tennyson used to read him aloud in
+select company. I know that the two poets corresponded. We catch a
+glimpse of Swinburne's spasmodic insight in his first burst of
+enthusiasm over him, and then of his weakness in recanting.
+Swinburne's friend and house-mate, Watts Dunton, never could endure
+him, but what has he done? So it has gone and still is going, though
+now the acceptance of Whitman has become the fashion.
+
+I have always patted myself on the back for seeing the greatness of
+Whitman from the first day that I read a line of his. I was bewildered
+and disturbed by some things, but I saw enough to satisfy me of his
+greatness.
+
+Whitman had the same faith in himself that Kepler had in his work.
+Whitman said:
+
+    "Whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand, or ten million
+              years,
+    I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait."
+
+Kepler said: "The die is cast; the book is written, to be read either
+now or by posterity. I care not which. It may well wait a century for
+a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an observer like
+myself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Judging from fragments of his letters that I have seen, Henry James
+was unquestionably hypersensitive. In his dislike of publicity he was
+extreme to the point of abnormality; it made him ill to see his name
+in print, except under just the right conditions. He wanted all things
+veiled and softened. He fled his country, abjured it completely. The
+publicity of it, of everything in America--its climate, its day, its
+night, the garish sun, its fierce, blazing light, the manner of its
+people, its politics, its customs--fairly made him cringe. During his
+last visit here he tried lecturing, but soon gave it up. He fled to
+veiled and ripened and cushioned England--not to the country, but to
+smoky London; and there his hypersensitive soul found peace and ease.
+He became a British subject, washed himself completely of every
+vestige of Americanism. This predilection of his probably accounts for
+the obscurity or tantalizing indirectness of his writings. The last
+story I read of his was called "One More Turn of the Screw," but what
+the screw was, or what the turn was, or whether anybody got pinched or
+squeezed, or what it was all about, I have not the slightest idea. He
+wrote about his visit here, his trip to Boston, to Albany, to New
+York, but which town he was writing about you could not infer from the
+context. He had the gift of a rich, choice vocabulary, but he wove it
+into impenetrable, though silken, veils that concealed more than they
+revealed. When replying to his correspondents on the typewriter, he
+would even apologize for "the fierce legibility of the type."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The contrast between the "singing-robes and the overalls of
+Journalism" is true and striking. Good and true writing no magazine or
+newspaper editor will blue-pencil. But "fine" writing is a different
+thing--a style that is conscious of itself, a style in which the
+thought is commonplace and the language studied and ornate, every
+judicious editor will blue-pencil. Downrightness and sententiousness
+are prime qualities; brevity, concreteness, spontaneity--in fact, all
+forms of genuine expression--help make literature. You know the
+genuine from the spurious, gold from pinchbeck, that's the rub. The
+secret of sound writing is not in the language, but in the mind or
+personality behind the language. The dull writer and the inspired
+writer use, or may use, the same words, and the product will be gold
+in the one and lead in the other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dana's book ["Two Years Before the Mast"] is a classic because it took
+no thought of being a classic. It is a plain, unvarnished tale, not
+loaded up with tedious descriptions. It is all action, a perpetual
+drama in which the sea, the winds, the seamen, the sails--mainsail,
+main royal, foresail--play the principal parts.
+
+There is no book depicting life on the sea to compare with it. Lately
+I have again tried to find the secret of its charm. In the first
+place, it is a plain, unvarnished tale, no attempt at fine writing in
+it. All is action from cover to cover. It is full of thrilling,
+dramatic scenes. In fact, it is almost a perpetual drama in which the
+sea, the winds, the storms, the sails, and the sailors play their
+parts. Each sail, from the smallest to the greatest, has its own
+character and its own part to play; sometimes many of them, sometimes
+few are upon the stage at once. Occasionally all the canvas was piled
+on at once, and then what a sight the ship was to behold! Scudding
+under bare poles was dramatic also.
+
+The life on board ship in those times--its humor, its tedium, its
+dangers, its hardships--was never before so vividly portrayed. The
+tyranny and cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of that
+little world of the ship's deck, stand out in strong relief. Dana had
+a memory like a phonographic record. Unless he took copious notes on
+this journey, it is incredible how he could have made it so complete,
+so specific is the life of each day. The reader craves more light on
+one point--the size of the ship, her length and tonnage. In setting
+out on the homeward journey they took aboard a dozen sheep, four
+bullocks, a dozen or more pigs, three or four dozen of poultry,
+thousands of dressed and cured hides, as well as fodder and feed for
+the cattle and poultry and pigs. The vessel seemed elastic; they could
+always find room for a few thousand more hides, if the need arose. The
+hides were folded up like the leaves of a book, and they invented
+curious machinery to press in a hundred hides where one could not be
+forced by hand. By this means the forty thousand hides were easily
+disposed of as part of the home cargo.
+
+The ship becomes a living being to the sailors. The Alert was so
+loaded, her cargo so _steved_ in, that she was stiff as a man in a
+strait-jacket. But the old sailors said: "Stand by. You'll see her
+work herself loose in a week or two, and then she'll walk up to Cape
+Horn like a race-horse."
+
+It is curious how the sailors can't work together without a song. "A
+song is as necessary to a sailor as the drum and fife are to the
+soldier. They can't pull in time, or pull with a will, without it."
+Some songs were much more effective than others. "Two or three songs
+would be tried, one after the other, with no effect--not an inch could
+be got upon the tackles, when a new song struck up seemed to hit the
+humor of the moment and drove the tackles two blocks at once. 'Heave
+round, hearty!' 'Captain gone ashore!' and the like, might do for
+common pulls, but in an emergency, when we wanted a heavy,
+raise-the-dead pull, which would start the beams of the ship, there
+was nothing like 'Time for us to go!' 'Round the corner,' or 'Hurrah!
+Hurrah! my hearty bullies!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mind of the professional critic, like the professional logical
+mind, becomes possessed of certain rules which it adheres to on all
+occasions. There is a well-known legal mind in this country which is
+typical. A recent political opponent of the man says:
+
+     His is the type of mind which would have sided with King
+     John against granting the Magna Charta; the type of mind
+     which would have opposed the ratification of the
+     Constitution of the United States because he would have
+     found so many holes in it. His is the type of mind which
+     would have opposed the Monroe Doctrine on the ground that it
+     was dangerous. His is the type of mind which would have
+     opposed the Emancipation Proclamation on the ground of
+     taking away property without due process of law. His is the
+     type of mind which would have opposed Cleveland's Venezuela
+     message to England on the ground that it was unprecedented.
+     His is the type of mind which did its best in 1912 to oppose
+     Theodore Roosevelt's effort to make the Republican Party
+     progressive.
+
+Such a mind would have no use for Roosevelt, for instance, because
+Roosevelt was not bound by precedents, but made precedents of his own.
+The typical critical mind, such as Arnold's, would deny the title of
+philosopher to a man who has no constructive talent, who could not
+build up his own philosophy into a system. He would deny another the
+title of poet because his verse has not the Miltonic qualities of
+simplicity, of sensuousness, of passion. Emerson was not a great man
+of letters, Arnold said, because he had not the genius and instinct
+for style; his prose had not the requisite wholeness of good tissue.
+Emerson's prose is certainly not Arnold's prose, but at its best it is
+just as effective.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a good idea of Santayana that "the function of poetry is to
+emotionalize philosophy."
+
+How absurd, even repulsive, is the argument of "Paradise Lost"! yet
+here is great poetry, not in the matter, but in the manner.
+
+    "Though fallen on evil days, on evil days though fallen."
+    "To shun delights and live laborious days."
+
+Common ideas, but what dignity in the expression!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Criticism is easy. When a writer has nothing else to do, he can
+criticize some other writer. But to create and originate is not so
+easy. One may say that appreciation is easy also. How many persons
+appreciate good literature who cannot produce it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The rash and the audacious are not the same. Audacity means boldness,
+but to be rash often means to be imprudent or foolhardy. When a little
+dog attacks a big dog, as so often happens, his boldness becomes
+rashness. When Charles Kingsley attacked Newman, his boldness turned
+out to be rashness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Little wonder that in his essay on "Books" Emerson recommends Thomas à
+Kempis's "Imitation of Christ." Substitute the word Nature for God and
+Christ and much of it will sound very Emersonian. Emerson was a kind
+of New England Thomas à Kempis. His spirit and attitude of mind were
+essentially the same, only directed to Nature and the modern world.
+Humble yourself, keep yourself in the background, and let the
+over-soul speak. "I desire no consolation which taketh from me
+compunction." "I love no contemplation which leads to pride." "For all
+that which is high is not holy, nor everything that is sweet, good."
+"I had rather feel contrition, than be skilled in the definition of
+it." "All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was
+written." How Emersonian all this sounds!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a fat volume of forty thousand quotations from the literature of
+all times and countries, compiled by some patient and industrious
+person, at least half of it is not worth the paper on which it is
+printed. There seem to be more quotations in it from Shakespeare than
+from any other poet, which is as it should be. There seem to be more
+from Emerson than from any other American poet, which again is as it
+should be. Those from the great names of antiquity--the Bible, Sadi,
+Cicero, Æschylus, Euripides, Aristotle, and others--are all worth
+while, and the quotations from Bacon, Newton, Addison, Locke, Chaucer,
+Johnson, Carlyle, Huxley, Tennyson, Goethe are welcome. But the
+quotations from women writers and poets,--Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Sigourney,
+Jean Ingelow, and others,--what are they worth? Who would expect
+anything profound from J. G. Holland or Chapin, O. W. Holmes, or
+Alger, or Alcott, or Helps, or Dickens, or Lewes, or Froude, or
+Lowell? I certainly should not.
+
+Such a selection is good to leaf over. Your thought may be kindled or
+fanned here and there. The subjects are arranged alphabetically, and
+embrace nearly all themes of human interest from ability to zephyrs.
+There is very little from Whitman, and, I think, only one quotation
+from Thoreau.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The death of Howells gave me a shock. I had known him long, though not
+intimately. He was my senior by only one month. It had been two years
+or more since I had seen him. Last December I read his charming paper on
+"Eighty Years and After" and enjoyed it greatly. It is a masterpiece. No
+other American man of letters, past or present, could have done that. In
+fact, there has been no other American who achieved the all-round
+literary craftsmanship that Mr. Howells achieved. His equal in his own
+line we have never seen. His felicity on all occasions was a wonder. His
+works do not belong to the literature of power, but to the literature of
+charm, grace, felicity. His style is as flexible and as limpid as a
+mountain rill. Only among the French do we find such qualities in such
+perfection. Some of his writings--"Their Wedding Journey," for
+instance--are too photographic. We miss the lure of the imagination,
+such as Hawthorne gave to all his pictures of real things. Only one of
+Howells's volumes have I found too thin for me to finish--his "London
+Films" was too filmy for me. I had read Taine's "London Notes" and felt
+the force of a different type of mind. But Howells's "Eighty Years and
+After" will live as a classic. Oh, the felicity of his style! One of his
+later poems on growing old ("On a Bright Winter's Day" it is called) is
+a gem.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SUNDOWN PAPERS
+
+RE-READING BERGSON
+
+
+I am trying again to read Bergson's "Creative Evolution," with poor
+success. When I recall how I was taken with the work ten or more years
+ago, and carried it with me whenever I went from home, I am wondering
+if my mind has become too old and feeble to take it in. But I do not
+have such difficulty with any other of my favorite authors. Bergson's
+work now seems to me a mixture of two things that won't
+mix--metaphysics and natural science. It is full of word-splitting and
+conjuring with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. The style
+is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. He enlarges upon the
+inability of the intellect to understand or grasp Life. The reason is
+baffled, but sympathy and the emotional nature and the intuitions
+grasp the mystery.
+
+This may be true, the heart often knows what the head does not; but is
+it not the intellect that tells us so? The intellect understands the
+grounds of our inability. We can and do reason about the limitations
+of reason. We do not know how matter and spirit blend, but we know
+they do blend. The animals live by instinct, and we live largely in
+our emotions, but it is reason that has placed man at the head of the
+animal kingdom.
+
+Bergson himself by no means dispenses with the logical faculty. Note
+his close and convincing reasoning on the development of the
+vertebrate eye, and how inadequate the Darwinian idea of the
+accumulation of insensible variations is to account for it. A closer
+and more convincing piece of reasoning would be hard to find.
+
+Bergson's conception of two currents--an upward current of spirit and
+a downward current of matter--meeting and uniting at a definite time
+and place and producing life, is extremely fanciful. Where had they
+both been during all the geologic ages? I do not suppose they had been
+any _where_. How life arose is, of course, one of the great mysteries.
+But do we not know enough to see that it did not originate in this
+sudden spectacular way?--that it began very slowly, in unicellular
+germs?
+
+At first I was so captivated by the wonderful style of M. Bergson, and
+the richness of his page in natural history, that I could see no flaws
+in his subject-matter, but now that my enthusiasm has cooled off a
+little I return to him and am looking closer into the text.
+
+Is not Bergson guilty of false or careless reasoning when he says
+that the relation of the soul to the brain is like that of a coat to
+the nail upon which it hangs? I call this spurious or pinchbeck
+analogy. If we know anything about it, do we not know that the
+relation of the two is not a mechanical or fortuitous one? and that it
+cannot be defined in this loose way?
+
+"To a large extent," Bergson says, "thought is independent of the
+brain." "The brain is, strictly speaking, neither an organ of thought,
+nor of feeling, nor of consciousness." He speaks of consciousness as
+if it were a disembodied something floating around in the air
+overhead, like wireless messages. If I do not think with my brain,
+with what do I think? Certainly not with my legs, or my abdomen, or my
+chest. I think with my head, or the gray matter of my brain. I look
+down at the rest of my body and I say, this is part of me, but it is
+not the real me. With both legs and both arms gone, I should still be
+I. But cut off my head and where am I?
+
+Has not the intelligence of the animal kingdom increased during the
+geologic ages with the increase in the size of the brain?
+
+REVISIONS
+
+I have little need to revise my opinion of any of the great names of
+English literature. I probably make more strenuous demands upon him
+who aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than
+ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make
+poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes
+honey. Many of our would-be young poets bring us the crude nectar from
+the fields--fine descriptions of flowers, birds, sunsets, and so
+on--and expect us to accept them as honey. The quality of the man
+makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe
+birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn
+greatly.
+
+Dean Swift quotes Sir Philip Sidney as saying that the "chief life of
+modern versifying consists in rhyme." Swift agrees with him. "Verse
+without rhyme," he says, "is a body without a soul, or a bell without
+a clapper." He thinks Milton's "Paradise Lost" would be greatly
+improved if it had rhyme. This, he says, would make it "more heroic
+and sonorous than it is."
+
+Unobtrusive rhyme may be a help in certain cases, but what modern
+reader would say that a poem without rhyme is a body without a soul?
+This would exclude many of the noblest productions of English
+literature.
+
+BERGSON AND TELEPATHY
+
+Bergson seems always to have been more than half-convinced of the
+truth of spiritualism. When we are already half-convinced of a thing,
+it takes but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself into a
+belief in telepathy in this wise: "We produce electricity at every
+moment; the atmosphere is continually electrified; we move among
+magnetic currents. Yet for thousands of years millions of human beings
+have lived who never suspected the existence of electricity."
+
+Millions of persons have also lived without suspecting the pull of the
+sun and moon upon us; or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our
+bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or that the coast of this
+part of the continent is slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the
+earth's crust); or without suspecting the incredible speed of the
+stars in the midnight sky; or that the earth is turning under our
+feet; or that electrons are shooting off from the candle or lamp by
+the light of which we are reading. There are assuredly more things in
+heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, many of which
+we shall doubtless yet find out, and many more of which we shall never
+find out. Wireless messages may be continually going through our
+houses and our bodies, and through the air we breathe, and we never
+suspect them. Shall we, then, infer that the air around us is full of
+spirits of our departed friends? I hope it is, but I fail to see any
+warrant for the belief in this kind of reasoning. It does not lend
+color even to the probability, any more than it does to the
+probability that we shall yet be able to read one another's thoughts
+and become expert mind-readers. Mind-reading seems to be a reality
+with a few persons, with one in many millions. But I cannot therefore
+believe in spiritualism as I believe in the "defeat of the Invincible
+Armada." Fleets have been defeated in all ages. Facts are amenable to
+observation and experiment, but merely alleged facts do not stand the
+laboratory tests.
+
+If memory is not a function of the brain, of what is it a function? If
+"judgment, reasoning, or any other act of thought" are not functions
+of the brain, of what are they the functions? The scientific method is
+adequate to deal with all questions capable of proof or disproof. If
+we apply the scientific or experimental method to miracles, where does
+it leave them? Ask Huxley. Thought-transference is possible, but does
+this prove spiritualism to be true?
+
+I know of a man who can answer your questions if you know the answers
+yourself, even without reading them or hearing you ask them. He once
+read a chemical formula for Edison which nobody but Edison had ever
+seen. I am glad that such things are possible. They confirm our faith
+in the reality of the unseen. They show us in what a world of occult
+laws and influences we live, but they tell us nothing of any other
+world.
+
+METEORIC MEN AND PLANETARY MEN
+
+There are meteoric men and there are planetary men. The men who now
+and then flash across our intellectual heavens, drawing all eyes for
+the moment, these I call meteoric men. What a contrast they present to
+the planetary men, who are slow to attract our attention, but who
+abide, and do not grow dim! Poets like Emerson, Whitman, and
+Wordsworth were slow to gain recognition, but the radiance of their
+names grows. I call such a poet as Swinburne meteoric, a poet of a
+certain kind of brilliant power, but who reads him now? Stephen
+Phillips with his "Marpessa" had a brief vogue, and then disappeared
+in the darkness. When I was a young man, I remember, a Scottish poet,
+Alexander Smith, published a "Life Drama," which dazzled the literary
+world for a brief period, but it is forgotten now. What attention
+Kidd's "Social Evolution" attracted a generation or more ago! But it
+is now quite neglected. It was not sound. When he died a few years ago
+there was barely an allusion to it in the public press. The same fate
+befell that talented man, Buckle, with his "Civilization in England."
+Delia Bacon held the ear of the public for a time with the
+Bacon-Shakespeare theory. Pulpit men like Joseph Cook and Adirondack
+Murray blazed out, and then were gone. Half a century ago or more an
+Englishman by the name of M. F. Tupper published a book called
+"Proverbial Philosophy" which had a brief season of popularity, and
+then went out like a rush-light, or a blaze of tissue paper. Novels
+like Miss Sprague's "Earnest Trifler," Du Maurier's "Trilby," and
+Wallace's "Ben Hur" have had their little day, and been forgotten. In
+the art world the Cubists' crazy work drew the attention of the public
+long enough for it to be seen how spurious and absurd it was.
+Brownell's war poems turned out to be little more than brief
+fireworks. Joaquin Miller, where is he? Fifty years ago Gail Hamilton
+was much in the public eye, and Grace Greenwood, and Fanny Fern; and
+in Bohemian circles, there were Agnes Franz and Ada Clare, but they
+are all quite forgotten now.
+
+The meteoric men would not appreciate President Wilson's wise saying
+that he would rather fail in a cause that in time is bound to succeed
+than to succeed in a cause that in time is bound to fail. Such men
+cannot wait for success. Meteoric men in politics, like Elaine and
+Conkling, were brilliant men, but were politicians merely. What
+fruitful or constructive ideas did they leave us? Could they forget
+party in the good of the whole country? Are not the opponents of the
+League of Nations of our own day in the same case--without, however,
+shining with the same degree of brilliancy? To some of our
+Presidents--Polk, Pierce, Buchanan--we owe little or nothing.
+Roosevelt's career, though meteoric in its sudden brilliancy, will
+shine with a steady light down the ages. He left lasting results. He
+raised permanently the standard of morality in politics and business
+in this country by the gospel of the square deal. Woodrow Wilson,
+after the mists and clouds are all dispelled, will shine serenely on.
+He is one of the few men of the ages.
+
+THE DAILY PAPERS
+
+Probably the worst feature of our civilization is the daily paper. It
+scatters crime, bad manners, and a pernicious levity as a wind
+scatters fire. Crime feeds upon crime, and the newspapers make sure
+that every criminally inclined reader shall have enough to feed upon,
+shall have his vicious nature aroused and stimulated. Is it probable
+that a second and a third President of the United States would ever
+have been assassinated by shooting, had not such notoriety been given
+to the first crime? Murder, arson, theft, peculation, are as
+contagious as smallpox.
+
+Who can help a pitying or a scornful smile when he hears of a school
+of journalism, a school for promoting crime and debauching the manners
+and the conscience of the people?--for teaching the gentle art of
+lying, for manufacturing news when there is no news? The pupils are
+taught, I suppose, how to serve up the sweepings from the streets and
+the gutters and the bar-rooms in the most engaging manner. They are
+taught how to give the great Public what it wants, and the one thing
+the great Public wants, and can never get enough of is any form of
+sensationalism. It clearly loves scandals about the rich, or anything
+about the rich, because we all want and expect to be rich, to
+out-shine our neighbors, to cut a wide swath in society. Give us
+anything about the rich, the Public says; we will take the mud from
+their shoes; if we can't get that, give us the parings of their
+finger-nails.
+
+The inelastic character of the newspaper is a hampering factor--so
+many columns must be filled, news or no news. And when there is a
+great amount of important news, see how much is suppressed that but
+for this inelasticity would have been printed!
+
+The professor at the school of journalism says: "I try to hammer it
+into them day after day that they have got to learn to get the
+news--that, whatever else a reporter can or cannot do, he isn't a
+reporter till he has learned to get the news." Hence the invasion of
+private houses, the bribery, the stealing of letters, the listening at
+key-holes, the craze for photographing the most sacred episodes, the
+betrayals of confidence, that the newspapers are responsible for.
+They must get what the dear Public most likes to hear, if they have to
+scale a man's housetop, and come down his chimney. And if they cannot
+get the true story, they must invent one. The idle curiosity of the
+Public must be satisfied.
+
+Now the real news, the news the Public is entitled to, is always easy
+to get. It grows by the wayside. The Public is entitled to public
+news, not to family secrets; to the life of the street and the mart,
+not to life behind closed doors. In the dearth of real news, the paper
+is filled with the dust and sweepings from the public highways and
+byways, from saloons, police courts, political halls--sordid,
+ephemeral, and worthless, because it would never get into print if
+there were real news to serve up.
+
+Then the advertising. The items of news now peep out at us from
+between flaming advertisements of the shopmen's goods, like men on the
+street hawking their wares, each trying to out-scream the other and
+making such a Bedlam that our ears are stunned.[6]
+
+[Footnote 6: This fragment is hardly representative of the attitude of
+Mr. Burroughs toward our worthy dailies, and, could he have expanded
+the article, it would have had in its entirety a different tone. He
+lived on the breath of the newspapers; was always eager for legitimate
+news; and was especially outspoken in admiration of the superb work
+done by many newspaper correspondents during the World War.
+Furthermore, he was himself always most approachable and friendly to
+the reporters, complaining, however, that they often failed to quote
+him when he took real pains to help them get things straight; while
+they often insisted on emphasizing sensational aspects, and even put
+words in his mouth which he never uttered. But the truth is, he valued
+the high-class newspapers, though regarding even them as a two-edged
+sword, since their praiseworthy efforts are so vitiated by craze for
+the sensational.--C. B.]
+
+THE ALPHABET
+
+Until we have stopped to think about it, few of us realize what it
+means to have an alphabet--the combination of a few straight lines and
+curves which form our letters. When you have learned these, and how to
+arrange them into words, you have the key that unlocks all the
+libraries in the world. An assortment and arrangement of black lines
+on a white surface! These lines mean nothing in themselves; they are
+not symbols, nor pictures, nor hieroglyphics, yet the mastery of them
+is one of the touchstones of civilization. The progress of the race
+since the dawn of history, or since the art of writing has been
+invented, has gone forward with leaps and bounds. The prehistoric
+races, and the barbarous races of our own times, had and have only
+picture language.
+
+The Chinese have no alphabet. It is said that they are now accepting a
+phonetic alphabet. The Chinese system of writing comprises more than
+forty thousand separate symbols, each a different word. It requires
+the memorizing of at least three thousand word-signs to read and write
+their language. The national phonetic script is made up of sixty
+distinct characters that answer to our twenty-four. These characters
+embrace every verbal sound of the language, and in combination make up
+every word. The progress of China has been greatly hampered by this
+want of an alphabet.
+
+Coleridge says about the primary art of writing: "First, there is mere
+gesticulation, then rosaries, or wampum, then picture language, then
+hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters,"--the last an evolution
+from all that went before. But there is no more suggestion of an
+alphabet in the sign language of the North American Indian than there
+is of man in a crinoid.
+
+THE REDS OF LITERATURE
+
+A class of young men who seem to look upon themselves as revolutionary
+poets has arisen, chiefly in Chicago; and they are putting forth the
+most astonishing stuff in the name of free verse that has probably
+ever appeared anywhere. In a late number of "Current Opinion," Carl
+Sandburg, who, I am told, is their chosen leader, waves his dirty
+shirt in the face of the public in this fashion:
+
+    "My shirt is a token and a symbol more than a cover from sun and rain,
+    My shirt is a signal and a teller of souls,
+    I can take off my shirt and tear it, and so make a ripping razzly
+              noise, and the people will say, 'Look at him tear his shirt!'
+
+    "I can keep my shirt on,
+    I can stick around and sing like a little bird, and look 'em all in the
+              eye and never be fazed,
+    I can keep my shirt on."
+
+Does not this resemble poetry about as much as a pile of dirty rags
+resembles silk or broadcloth? The trick of it seems to be to take
+flat, unimaginative prose and cut it up in lines of varying length,
+and often omit the capitals at the beginning of the lines--"shredded
+prose," with no "kick" in it at all. These men are the "Reds" of
+literature. They would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and
+standards upon which literature is founded. They show what Bolshevism
+carried out in the field of poetry, would lead to. One of them who
+signs himself H. D. writes thus in the "Dial" on "Helios":
+
+    "Helios makes all things right--
+    night brands and chokes,
+    as if destruction broke
+    over furze and stone and crop
+    of myrtle-shoot and field-wort,
+    destroyed with flakes of iron,
+    the bracken-stone,
+    where tender roots were sown
+    blight, chaff, and wash
+    of darkness to choke and drown.
+
+    "A curious god to find,
+    yet in the end faithful;
+    bitter, the Kyprian's feet--
+    ah, flecks of withered clay,
+    great hero, vaunted lord--
+    ah, petals, dust and windfall
+    on the ground--queen awaiting queen."
+
+What it all means--who can tell? It is as empty of intelligent meaning
+as a rubbish-heap. Yet these men claim to get their charter from
+Whitman. I do not think Whitman would be enough interested in them to
+feel contempt toward them. Whitman was a man of tremendous
+personality, and every line he wrote had a meaning, and his whole work
+was suffused with a philosophy as was his body with blood.
+
+These Reds belong to the same class of inane sensationalists that the
+Cubists do; they would defy in verse what the Cubists defy in form.
+
+I have just been skimming through an illustrated book called "Noa
+Noa," by a Frenchman, which describes, or pretends to describe, a
+visit to Tahiti. There is not much fault to be found with it as a
+narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the
+figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they
+had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple,
+honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the
+Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all--a
+refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal
+and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the
+outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and
+the other Ists among the French have turned out. The degenerate
+Frenchman is like our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining,
+and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an odor of dead rats.
+
+I recently chanced upon the picture of a kneeling girl, by one of the
+Reds in art, a charcoal sketch apparently. It suggests the crude
+attempts of a child. The mouth is a black, smutty hole in the face,
+the eyes are not mates, and one of them is merely a black dot. In
+fact, the whole head seems thrust up into a cloud of charcoal dust.
+The partly nude body has not a mark of femininity. The body is very
+long and the legs very short, and the knees, as they protrude from
+under the drapery, look like two irregular blocks of wood.
+
+To falsify or belie nature seems to be the sole aim of these
+creatures. The best thing that could happen to the whole gang of them
+would be to be compelled to go out and dig and spade the earth. They
+would then see what things are really like.
+
+THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION
+
+It is interesting to note that the doctrine of evolution itself has
+undergone as complete an evolution as has any animal species with
+which it deals. We find the germ of it, so to speak, in the early
+Greek philosophers and not much more. Crude, half-developed forms of
+it begin to appear in the eighteenth century of our era and become
+more and more developed in the nineteenth, till they approximate
+completion in Darwin. In Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795 there are
+glimpses of the theory, but in Lamarck, near the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, the theory is so fully developed that it
+anticipates Darwin on many points; often full of crudities and
+absurdities, yet Lamarck hits the mark surprisingly often. In 1813 Dr.
+W. C. Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the Royal Society in
+London that contains a passage that might have come from the pages of
+Darwin. In the anonymous and famous volume called "Vestiges of
+Creation," published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of
+species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution
+theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the
+minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse
+toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again in
+Lamarck, but was repudiated by Darwin.
+
+FOLLOWING ONE'S BENT
+
+I have done what I most wanted to do in the world, what I was probably
+best fitted to do, not as the result of deliberate planning or
+calculation, but by simply going with the current, that is, following
+my natural bent, and refusing to run after false gods. Riches and fame
+and power, when directly pursued, are false gods. If a man
+deliberately says to himself, "I will win these things," he has
+likely reckoned without his host. His host is the nature within and
+without him, and that may have something to say on the subject. But if
+he says, "I will do the worthy work that comes to my hand, the work
+that my character and my talent bring me, and I will do it the best I
+can," he will not reap a barren harvest.
+
+So many persons are disappointed in life! They have had false aims.
+They have wanted something for nothing. They have listened to the call
+of ambition and have not heeded the inner light. They have tried short
+cuts to fame and fortune, and have not been willing to pay the price
+in self-denial that all worthy success demands. We find our position
+in life according to the specific gravity of our moral and
+intellectual natures.
+
+NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OLD AGE[7]
+
+The physiology of old age is well understood--general sluggishness of
+all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called
+rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing
+hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the
+psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons
+well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert,
+the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old
+man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and
+experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their
+relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a
+person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he
+remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may
+go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of
+those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them
+from their graves: There was G----; how distinctly he recalls the name
+and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was
+B----, a name only. There was R----, and the memory of the career he
+had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat
+accident; but of his looks, his voice--not a vestige! It is a memory
+full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls
+his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly--voice, look,
+manner--all complete. Others are only names associated with certain
+incidents in school.
+
+[Footnote 7: These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand
+into an article, were among the very last things he wrote.--C. B.]
+
+Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his
+life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt
+slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then the next moment, away it
+goes again! Or, shall we call it a kind of mental anæsthesia, or
+mental paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about
+Georgetown, South America. I repeated the name over to myself a few
+times. "Have I not known such a place some time in my life? Where is
+it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" The name seemed like a dream. Then I
+thought of Washington, the Capital, and the city above it, but had to
+ask a friend if the name was Georgetown. Then suddenly, as if some
+chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came!
+Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it?
+(I had lived in Washington for ten years.)
+
+So we say, old age may reason well, but old age does not remember
+well. This is a commonplace. It seems as if memory were the most
+uncertain of all our faculties.
+
+Power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in
+the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we
+octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not
+grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only
+need to focus upon you a little more completely.
+
+Of course both sight and hearing are a little blunted in old age. But
+for myself I see as well as ever I did, except that I have to use
+spectacles in reading; but nowadays the younger observers hear the
+finer sounds in nature that sometimes escape me.
+
+Some men mellow with age, others harden, but the man who does not in
+some way ripen is in a bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what it
+lacks in repose.
+
+To grow old gracefully is the trick.
+
+To me one of the worst things about old age is that one has outlived
+all his old friends. The Past becomes a cemetery.
+
+"As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, "they grow more foolish and
+more wise"--wise in counsel, but foolish in conduct. "There is no fool
+like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is equally true that there is
+no fool like the young fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to
+middle age.
+
+As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting to collate many wise
+sayings of many wise men on youth and age.[8]
+
+[Footnote 8: Here followed several pages of quotations from the
+ancients and moderns.--C. B.]
+
+Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is
+certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any.
+They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent,
+the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of
+pleasures is gone and another takes its place.
+
+Emerson published his essay on "Old Age" while he was yet in the
+middle sixties, and I recall that in the "Emerson-Carlyle
+Correspondence" both men began to complain of being old before they
+were sixty. Scott was old before his time, and Macaulay too. Scott
+died at sixty-one, Macaulay at fifty-nine, Tennyson at eighty-three,
+Carlyle at eighty-six, Emerson at seventy-nine, Amiel at sixty.
+
+I have heard it said that it is characteristic of old age to reverse
+its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them;
+it revises them. If its years have been well spent, it has reached a
+higher position from which to overlook life. It commands a wider view,
+and the relation of the parts to the whole is more clearly seen....
+
+"Old age superbly rising"--Whitman.
+
+Age without decrepitude, or remorse, or fear, or hardness of heart!
+
+FACING THE MYSTERY
+
+I wish there were something to light up the grave for me, but there is
+not. It is the primal, unending darkness. The faith of all the saints
+and martyrs does not help me. I must see the light beyond with my own
+eyes. Whitman's indomitable faith I admire, but cannot share. My torch
+will not kindle at his great flame. From our youth up our associations
+with the dead and with the grave are oppressive. Our natural animal
+instincts get the better of us. Death seems the great catastrophe.
+The silver cord is loosened, and the golden bowl is broken. The
+physical aspects of death are unlovely and repellent. And the
+spiritual aspects--only the elect can see them. Our physical senses
+are so dominant, the visible world is so overpowering, that all else
+becomes as dreams and shadows.
+
+I know that I am a part of the great cosmic system of things, and that
+all the material and all the forces that make up my being are as
+indestructible as the great Cosmos itself--all that is physical must
+remain in some form. But consciousness, the real Me, is not physical,
+but an effect of the physical. It is really no more a thing than "a
+child's curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the night," and as the one is
+evanescent, why not the other?
+
+Nature is so opulent, so indifferent to that we hold most precious,
+such a spendthrift, evokes such wonders from such simple materials!
+Why should she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff of
+myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays down. Her cycles of
+change, of life and death, go on forever. She does not lay up stores;
+she is, and has, all stores, whether she keep or whether she waste. It
+is all the same to her. There is no outside, no beyond, to her
+processes and possessions. There is no future for her, only an
+ever-lasting present. What is the very bloom and fragrance of
+humanity to the Infinite? In the yesterday of geologic time, humanity
+was not. In the to-morrow of geologic time, it will not be. The very
+mountains might be made of souls, and all the stars of heaven kindled
+with souls, such is the wealth of Nature in what we deem so precious,
+and so indifferent is she to our standards of valuation.
+
+This I know, too: that the grave is not dark or cold to the dead, but
+only to the living. The light of the eye, the warmth of the body,
+still exist undiminished in the universe, but in other relations,
+under other forms. Shall the flower complain because it fades and
+falls? It has to fall before the fruit can appear. But what is the
+fruit of the flower of human life? Surely not the grave, as the loose
+thinking of some seem to imply. The only fruit I can see is in fairer
+flowers, or a higher type of mind and life that follows in this world,
+and to which our lives may contribute. The flower of life has improved
+through the ages--the geologic ages; from the flower of the brute, it
+has become the flower of the man. You and I perish, but something goes
+out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of
+mankind. To what end? Who knows? We cannot cross-question the
+Infinite. Something in the universe has eventuated in man, and
+something has profited by his ameliorations. We must regard him as a
+legitimate product, and we must look upon death as a legitimate part
+of the great cycle--an evil only from our temporary and personal point
+of view, but a good from the point of view of the whole.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Adaptation, 247, 248.
+
+Agassiz, Louis, 163.
+
+Alchemy, 242, 243.
+
+Alcott, Amos Bronson, in Emerson's Journals, 26-29;
+  on Thoreau, 156.
+
+Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 253.
+
+Alphabet, the, 275, 276.
+
+American people, the, 252, 253.
+
+Amiel, Henri Frederic, 4-6;
+  quoted, 223.
+
+Arnim, Elisabeth von, 34, 35.
+
+Arnold, Matthew, 213, 250, 260;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 25;
+  on Emerson, 87, 89, 90;
+  his poetry, 209;
+  on poetry, 212.
+
+Art, recent "isms" in, 278, 279.
+
+Audacity, 261.
+
+Aurora borealis, 140, 141.
+
+
+Batavia Kill, 244.
+
+Beauty, 98-101, 246, 247, 251, 252.
+
+Beecher, Henry Ward, 232.
+
+Bent, following one's, 280, 281.
+
+Benton, Myron, 26.
+
+Bergson, Henri, his "Creative Evolution," revised estimate of, 264-66;
+  and telepathy, 267, 268.
+
+Bettina, Goethe's, 34, 35.
+
+Bittern, pumping, 135.
+
+Boldness, 261.
+
+Bouton, Deborah, 244.
+
+Bryant, William Cullen, his poetry, 203, 204, 222.
+
+Burns, Robert, 213.
+
+Burroughs, John, chronic homesickness, 227, 228.
+
+
+Cactus, 248.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, 34, 35, 43, 47, 97;
+  contrasted with Emerson, 30;
+  correspondence with Emerson, 39, 40, 61, 80, 81;
+  on Webster, 61;
+  as a painter, 76, 77;
+  Emerson's love and admiration for, 79-82;
+  his style, 82.
+
+Channing, William Ellery, 2d, 138-40;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 9, 29, 30, 142;
+  in Thoreau's Journal, 149.
+
+City, the, 226, 227.
+
+Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, quoted, 276.
+
+Contrasts, 218-29.
+
+Country, life in the, 226-28.
+
+Critic, the professional, 259, 260.
+
+Criticism, 260.
+
+
+D., H., quoted, 277.
+
+Dana, Richard Henry, his "Two Years before the Mast," 256-58.
+
+Dargan, Olive Tilford, quoted, 201, 202.
+
+Darwin, Charles, criticism of his selection theories, 172-89, 193-98;
+  his "Voyage of the Beagle," 189-93;
+  his significance, 198-200.
+
+Days, memorable, 231.
+
+Death, thoughts on, 285-88.
+
+De Vries, Hugo, his mutation theory, 196, 197.
+
+Discovery, 223-25.
+
+
+Early and late, 230, 231.
+
+Eating, 77-79.
+
+Edison, Thomas A., 243, 269.
+
+Electricity, 231.
+
+Emerson, Charles, 5.
+
+Emerson, Dr. Edward W., on Thoreau, 155, 156.
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 136, 214, 227, 239;
+  Journals of, discussed, 1-85;
+  a new estimate of, 1-4;
+  and social intercourse, 6-8;
+  self-reliance, 8, 31, 32;
+  poet and prophet of the moral ideal, 9-11;
+  his lectures, 11, 12, 64, 65, 162;
+  his supreme test of men, 12, 13, 17;
+  his "Days," 14;
+  his "Humble-Bee," 14;
+  "Each and All," 15;
+  "Two Rivers," 15, 16;
+  on Poe, 16;
+  on Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," 17;
+  as a reader and a writer, 17, 18;
+  his main interests, 18;
+  on Jesus as a Representative Man, 20;
+  on Thoreau, 22, 23, 141, 156, 157;
+  and John Muir, 23, 24;
+  alertness, 24;
+  on Matthew Arnold, 25;
+  on Lowell, 25, 26;
+  on Alcott, 26-29;
+  on Father Taylor, 28, 29;
+  occupied with the future, 30;
+  his "Song of Nature," 30, 31;
+  near and far, past and present, 31, 32;
+  and human sympathy, 32, 33, 38, 39;
+  "Representative Men," 33;
+  attitude towards Whitman, 34, 253;
+  literary estimates, 34, 35;
+  on Wordsworth, 36;
+  correspondence with Carlyle, 39, 40;
+  love of nature, 41-43;
+  his book "Nature," 41, 43, 88, 89, 230;
+  his "May-Day," 43;
+  feeling for profanity and racy speech, 44-48;
+  humor, 45-48;
+  thoughts about God, 48-52;
+  attitude towards science, 52-60;
+  on Webster, 60-63;
+  religion, 63, 64;
+  self-criticism, 65-67;
+  "Terminus," 67;
+  catholicity, 67-70;
+  on the Bible, 70;
+  his selection of words, 70, 71;
+  ideas but no doctrines, 71, 72;
+  his limitations, 73-75;
+  and Hawthorne, 73-75;
+  a painter of ideas, 76, 77;
+  on eating and the artist, 77;
+  love and admiration for Carlyle, 79-82;
+  hungered for the quintessence of things, 84;
+  the last result of Puritanism, 85;
+  an estimate of, 86-92;
+  attitude towards poverty, 89;
+  weak in logic, 91;
+  passion for analogy, 92;
+  false notes in rhetoric, 92-94;
+  speaking with authority, 95;
+  at the Holmes breakfast, 95, 96;
+  his face, 96;
+  criticisms of, 96-101;
+  on beauty, 98, 99;
+  last words on, 102;
+  compared with Thoreau, 126;
+  intercourse with Thoreau, 156-58;
+  incident related by Thoreau, 158;
+  on Walter Scott, 216;
+  on oratory, 232;
+  a New England Thomas à Kempis, 261;
+  old age, 284, 285.
+
+Esopus, N. Y., 244.
+
+Ethical standards, 233.
+
+Everett, Edward, 223.
+
+Evolution, and the Darwinian theory, 174-89, 193-98;
+  chance in, 175-81;
+  the mutation theory, 196, 197;
+  Bergson reread, 264-66;
+  evolution of the doctrine, 279, 280.
+
+
+Farm, the home, 227, 228.
+
+Fist, the, 220, 221.
+
+Flagg, Wilson, Thoreau on, 165, 166.
+
+Flattery, 221, 222.
+
+Flowers, fadeless, 231.
+
+Fort Myers, 243.
+
+Fox, 135, 136.
+
+Fuller, Margaret, 7.
+
+
+Genius, and talent, 222, 223.
+
+Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 280.
+
+Germans, the, 3, 4.
+
+Gilchrist, Anne, on Emerson, 88.
+
+God, Emerson's idea of, 48-52;
+  Nature's, 233, 234.
+
+Goethe, 98.
+
+Gray, Eri, 244.
+
+Gray, Thomas, his "Elegy written in a Country Church-yard," 216.
+
+Grossmont, Cal., 240.
+
+
+H. D., quoted, 277.
+
+Hawaiian Islands, 236.
+
+Hawthorne, Nathaniel, and Emerson, 73-75.
+
+Hearn, Lafcadio, quoted, 202.
+
+Heat, 246.
+
+Hermits, 244.
+
+Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 253.
+
+History, the grand movements of, 249.
+
+Homesickness, 227-29.
+
+Howells, William Dean, 227;
+  an estimate, 262, 263.
+
+
+Insects, hum of, 244, 245.
+
+Invention, 223-26.
+
+
+James, Henry, his hypersensitiveness, 255, 256.
+
+James, William, quoted, 234.
+
+Journals, 4, 5.
+
+Juvenal, quoted, 242.
+
+
+Keator, Ike, 244.
+
+Kepler, Johann, quoted, 254.
+
+Kidd, Benjamin, his "Social Evolution," 270.
+
+Kingsley, Charles, a parable of, 189;
+  and Newman, 261.
+
+Knowledge, the Tree of, 248.
+
+
+Lamarck, 280.
+
+Landor, Walter Savage, Emerson and, 34, 35, 43.
+
+Life, the result of a system of checks and counter-checks, 236, 237.
+
+Lincoln, Abraham, 220, 221, 223.
+
+Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, in Emerson's Journals, 25.
+
+Loveman, Robert, his poetry, 204, 205;
+  quoted, 204, 205.
+
+Lowell, James Russell, in Emerson's Journals, 25;
+  criticism of Thoreau, 104-11;
+  love of books and of nature, 110, 111;
+  possessed talent but not genius, 223;
+  and Whitman, 253.
+
+
+McCarthy, John Russell, his poems, 204, 208, 223;
+  quoted, 214, 215, 223.
+
+Masefield, John, 208.
+
+Maui, 236.
+
+Meteoric men, 231, 232, 270-72.
+
+Milton, John, "Paradise Lost," 260;
+  quoted, 260.
+
+Montaigne, 8.
+
+Moody, William Vaughn, his poetry, 204-07;
+  quoted, 207.
+
+Morgan, Thomas Hunt, on Darwin, 200.
+
+Movements, in inert matter, 245.
+
+Muir, John, 23.
+
+Mutation theory, 196, 197.
+
+
+Natural history, and ethical and poetic values, 54-56.
+
+Natural selection, criticism of the theory, 178-89, 193-98.
+
+Newspapers, 272-74.
+
+"Noa Noa," 278.
+
+
+Old age, the psychology of, 281-85.
+
+Oratory, 232, 233.
+
+Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on chance in evolution, 175.
+
+
+Palm and fist, 220, 221.
+
+Pascal, Blaise, quoted, 233.
+
+Permanent, and transient, 218, 219.
+
+Phillips, Stephen, 270.
+
+Phillips, Wendell, 222, 232;
+  quoted, 221.
+
+Poe, Edgar Allan, 203;
+  Emerson on, 16, 74;
+  his poetry, 209-11.
+
+Poets, do not efface one another, 250, 251.
+
+Poetry, only the best significant, 201;
+  a discussion of, 201-17;
+  B.'s own, 203;
+  and philosophy, 203, 204, 207-09, 260;
+  not sweetened prose put up in verse form, 267;
+  red revolution in, 276-78.
+
+Pope, Alexander, 201.
+
+Positive and negative, 219, 220.
+
+Power, mankind drunk with, 248, 249.
+
+Praise, and flattery, 221, 222.
+
+Prayer, 233.
+
+
+Quotations, a book of, 261, 262.
+
+
+Rain, creative function of, 236.
+
+Rainbow, the, 137, 138.
+
+Rashness, 261.
+
+Reds of literature and art, the, 276-79.
+
+Reed, Sampson, 34, 35.
+
+Rhyme, 267.
+
+Ripley, Rev. Dr. Ezra, 45, 46.
+
+Robertson, Frederick William, 232.
+
+Rochefoucauld, quoted, 284.
+
+Roosevelt, Theodore, 220, 259, 272.
+
+Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 179.
+
+
+Sandburg, Carl, quoted, 276, 277.
+
+Santayana, George, quoted, 260.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, his poems, 216.
+
+Sea, the, 218.
+
+Sect, a queer, 243.
+
+Sexes, the, 238-40.
+
+Shakespeare, William, quoted, 242.
+
+Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 74.
+
+Sidney, Sir Philip, quoted, 267.
+
+Smith, Alexander, 270.
+
+Snake, mechanism for crushing eggs, 196.
+
+Snow, 252.
+
+Spanish-American War, 206.
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 280.
+
+Spiritualism, 267-69.
+
+Stanton, Edwin M., 221.
+
+Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 253.
+
+Style, 81-84, 256.
+
+Sublime, the, 251.
+
+Swift, Jonathan, 93, 267;
+  quoted, 223.
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 209, 254.
+
+
+Talent, and genius, 222, 223.
+
+Taylor, Edward T., 28, 29, 85.
+
+Telepathy, 267-69.
+
+Tennyson, Alfred, 41, 209, 250;
+  and Whitman, 254.
+
+Theories, absurd, 242, 243.
+
+Thomas à Kempis, 261;
+  quoted, 261.
+
+Thomson, J. Arthur, 96.
+
+Thoreau, Henry D., Journal of, 4, 5;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 20, 29;
+  compared with Emerson, 20-22;
+  his "Walden," 21;
+  "The Maine Woods," 21, 22;
+  "Cape Cod," 22;
+  Emerson on, 22, 23;
+  false notes in rhetoric, 93;
+  does not grow stale, 103;
+  ancestry, 104;
+  Lowell's criticism of, 104-11;
+  industry, 106;
+  philosophy and life, 108;
+  accomplishment, 109, 110;
+  his "Walden," 110, 143, 147;
+  humor, 110;
+  approving of Whitman, 111, 112;
+  as a nature writer, 112-20;
+  his Journal quoted and criticized, 113, 128, 134-37, 139-61, 163-65,
+                                     169, 170;
+  "Walden" quoted, 114-19, 137, 143, 146, 147;
+  travels, 119, 120;
+  uniqueness, 120, 121;
+  and science, 122;
+  individualism, 122, 123;
+  an extremist, 123, 124;
+  and civilization, 124, 125;
+  compared with Emerson, 126;
+  as a walker, 127-32;
+  his "Walking," 127-29;
+  his natural-history lore, 133-41;
+  faults as a writer, 141-46;
+  love of writing, 150;
+  literary activity, 153-55;
+  personality, 155-59;
+  and the Civil War, 159, 160;
+  and John Brown, 160;
+  inconsistencies, 160-62, 166;
+  his "Life without Principle," 162;
+  idealism, 162-68;
+  manual labor, 163-65;
+  moralizing on Bill Wheeler, 167, 168;
+  and human emotions, 168;
+  and young women, 168, 169;
+  as a philosopher, 169, 170;
+  merits as a man and a writer, 170, 171;
+  quoted, 242.
+
+Time, 241, 242.
+
+Timeliness, 230, 231.
+
+Torrey, Bradford, 134, 163.
+
+Town and country, 226-28.
+
+Transient, and permanent, 218, 219.
+
+Truth, 234, 235, 247.
+
+
+Verse, free, 276-78.
+
+Very, Jones, in Emerson's Journals, 9, 25;
+  Emerson's high opinion of, 35.
+
+"Vestiges of Creation," 280.
+
+Views, from mountain-tops, 240, 241.
+
+Virgil, quoted, 242.
+
+
+Walking, 127-32.
+
+Warbler, night, Thoreau's, 136.
+
+Wealth, 237, 238.
+
+Webster, Daniel, Emerson on, 60-63;
+  Carlyle on, 61.
+
+Weismann, August, 178.
+
+Wells, Dr. W. C., 280.
+
+Whitman, Walt, 94, 222, 227, 253, 278;
+  Emerson on "Leaves of Grass," 17;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 25;
+  Emerson's attitude towards, 34;
+  receives "May-Day" from Emerson, 43;
+  quoted, 100, 179, 202, 212, 250, 251, 254, 285;
+  Thoreau's approval of, 111, 112;
+  his philosophy, 208, 209;
+  as a criterion, 253, 254;
+  his faith in himself, 254.
+
+Whittier, John G., 92, 93;
+  and Whitman, 253.
+
+Wilkinson, Garth, 35.
+
+Wilson, Woodrow, 221, 232, 271.
+
+Winter, William, 253.
+
+Women, 238-40.
+
+Words, and style, 83, 84.
+
+Wordsworth, William, 216, 250, 251;
+  Emerson's estimate of, 36;
+  quoted, 100, 218;
+  a poet-walker, 130, 131;
+  on poetry and philosophy, 203;
+  great only at rare intervals, 212, 213.
+
+Wren, cactus, 248.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Harvest, by John Burroughs
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Harvest, by John Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Last Harvest
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: July 25, 2006 [EBook #18903]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST HARVEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p class="center"><img src="images/image_01.jpg" alt="Frontispiece" width="400" height="439" /></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>THE LAST HARVEST</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>JOHN BURROUGHS</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><img src="images/image_02.jpg" alt="Seal" width="150" height="198" /></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>BOSTON AND NEW YORK</h4>
+<h3>HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY</h3>
+<h4>The Riverside Press Cambridge</h4>
+<h3>1922</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza1">
+<span class="i10">But who is he with modest looks</span>
+<span class="i12">And clad in homely russet brown?</span>
+<span class="i10">He murmurs near the running brooks</span>
+<span class="i12">A music sweeter than their own.</span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza1">
+<span class="i10">He is retired as noontide dew,</span>
+<span class="i12">Or fountain in a noon-day grove;</span>
+<span class="i10">And you must love him, ere to you</span>
+<span class="i12">He will seem worthy of your love.</span>
+</div><div class="stanza1">
+<span class="i10">The outward shows of sky and earth,</span>
+<span class="i12">Of hill and valley, he has viewed;</span>
+<span class="i10">And impulses of deeper birth</span>
+<span class="i12">Have come to him in solitude.</span>
+</div><div class="stanza1">
+<span class="i10">In common things that round us lie</span>
+<span class="i12">Some random truths he can impart&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i10">The harvest of a quiet eye</span>
+<span class="i12">That broods and sleeps on his own heart.</span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="sig"><span class="smcap">Wordsworth</span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Most of the papers garnered here were written after fourscore
+years&mdash;after the heat and urge of the day&mdash;and are the fruit of a long
+life of observation and meditation.</p>
+
+<p>The author's abiding interest in Emerson is shown in his close and
+eager study of the Journals during these later years. He hungered for
+everything that concerned the Concord Sage, who had been one of the
+most potent influences in his life. Although he could discern flies in
+the Emersonian amber, he could not brook slight or indifference toward
+Emerson in the youth of to-day. Whatever flaws he himself detected, he
+well knew that Emerson would always rest secure on the pedestal where
+long ago he placed him. Likewise with Thoreau: If shortcomings were to
+be pointed out in this favorite, he wished to be the one to do it. And
+so, before taking Thoreau to task for certain inaccuracies, he takes
+Lowell to task for criticizing Thoreau. He then proceeds, not without
+evident satisfaction, to call attention to Thoreau's "slips" as an
+observer and reporter of nature; yet in no carping spirit, but, as he
+himself has said: "Not that I love Thoreau less, but that I love truth
+more."</p>
+
+<p>The "Short Studies in Contrasts," the "Day by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>Day" notes,
+"Gleanings," and the "Sundown Papers" which comprise the latter part
+of this, the last, posthumous volume by John Burroughs, were written
+during the closing months of his life. Contrary to his custom, he
+wrote these usually in the evening, or, less frequently, in the early
+morning hours, when, homesick and far from well, with the ceaseless
+pounding of the Pacific in his ears, and though incapable of the
+sustained attention necessary for his best work, he was nevertheless
+impelled by an unwonted mental activity to seek expression.</p>
+
+<p>If the reader misses here some of the charm and power of his usual
+writing, still may he welcome this glimpse into what John Burroughs
+was doing and thinking during those last weeks before the illness came
+which forced him to lay aside his pen.</p>
+
+<p class="sig1"><span class="smcap">Clara Barrus</span></p>
+
+<p class="sig2"><span class="smcap">Woodchuck Lodge</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Roxbury-in-the-Catskills</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="Contents">
+<tr><td class="tocch">I.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#I">Emerson and his Journals</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">II.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#II">Flies in Amber</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">III.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#III">Another Word on Thoreau</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">IV.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#IV">A Critical Glance into Darwin</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_172">172</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">V.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#V">What makes a Poem?</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">VI.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#VI">Short Studies in Contrasts:</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI_1">The Transient and the Permanent</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI_2">Positive and Negative</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_219">219</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI_3">Palm and Fist</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_220">220</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI_4">Praise and Flattery</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI_5">Genius and Talent</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_222">222</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI_6">Invention and Discovery</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#VI_7">Town and Country</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">VII.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#VII">Day by Day</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">VIII.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#VIII">Gleanings</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">IX.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#IX">Sundown Papers:</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_1">Re-reading Bergson</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_264">264</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_2">Revisions</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_3">Bergson and Telepathy</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_4">Meteoric Men and Planetary Men</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_5">The Daily Papers</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_272">272</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_6">The Alphabet</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_275">275</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_7">The Reds of Literature</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_276">276</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_8">The Evolution of Evolution</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_279">279</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_9">Following One's Bent</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_280">280</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_10">Notes on the Psychology of Old Age</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_281">281</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#IX_11">Facing the Mystery</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_285">285</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><span class="smcap"><a href="#INDEX">Index</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The frontispiece portrait is from a photograph by Miss Mabel
+Watson taken at Pasadena, California, shortly before Mr.
+Burroughs's death.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE LAST HARVEST</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+<h2>EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p>Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during
+his lifetime by the books he gave to the world. His Journals,
+published over a quarter of a century after his death, nearly or quite
+double the bulk of his writing, and while they do not rank in literary
+worth with his earlier works, they yet throw much light upon his life
+and character and it is a pleasure to me, in these dark and
+troublesome times,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and near the sun-down of my life, to go over
+them and point out in some detail their value and significance.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Written during the World War.&mdash;C.B.</p></div>
+
+<p>Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in
+the moral and religious development of our people, that attention
+cannot be directed to him too often. He could be entirely
+reconstructed from the unpublished matter which he left. Moreover,
+just to come in contact with him in times like ours is stimulating and
+refreshing. The younger generation will find that he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>can do them good
+if they will pause long enough in their mad skirting over the surface
+of things to study him.</p>
+
+<p>For my own part, a lover of Emerson from early manhood, I come back to
+him in my old age with a sad but genuine interest. I do not hope to
+find the Emerson of my youth&mdash;the man of daring and inspiring
+affirmation, the great solvent of a world of encrusted forms and
+traditions, which is so welcome to a young man&mdash;because I am no longer
+a young man. Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a
+formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are
+ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit. I find that something one
+gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
+It is a habit of mind, a test of values, a strengthening of one's
+faith in the essential soundness and goodness of creation. He helps to
+make you feel at home in nature, and in your own land and generation.
+He permanently exalts your idea of the mission of the poet, of the
+spiritual value of the external world, of the universality of the
+moral law, and of our kinship with the whole of nature.</p>
+
+<p>There is never any despondency or infirmity of faith in Emerson. He is
+always hopeful and courageous, and is an antidote to the pessimism and
+materialism which existing times tend to foster. Open anywhere in the
+Journals or in the Essays<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> and we find the manly and heroic note. He
+is an unconquerable optimist, and says boldly, "Nothing but God can
+root out God," and he thinks that in time our culture will absorb the
+hells also. He counts "the dear old Devil" among the good things which
+the dear old world holds for him. He saw so clearly how good comes out
+of evil and is in the end always triumphant. Were he living in our
+day, he would doubtless find something helpful and encouraging to say
+about the terrific outburst of scientific barbarism in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>It is always stimulating to hear a man ask such a question as this,
+even though he essay no answer to it: "Is the world (according to the
+old doubt) to be criticized otherwise than as the best possible in the
+existing system, and the population of the world the best that soils,
+climate, and animals permit?"</p>
+
+<p>I note that in 1837 Emerson wrote this about the Germans; "I do not
+draw from them great influence. The heroic, the holy, I lack. They are
+contemptuous. They fail in sympathy with humanity. The voice of nature
+they bring me to hear is not divine, but ghastly, hard, and ironical.
+They do not illuminate me: they do not edify me." Is not this the
+German of to-day? If Emerson were with us now he would see, as we all
+see, how the age of idealism and spiritual power in Germany that gave
+the world the great composers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> and the great poets and
+philosophers&mdash;Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing,
+Kant, Hegel, and others&mdash;has passed and been succeeded by the hard,
+cruel, and sterile age of materialism, and the domination of an
+aggressive and conscienceless military spirit. Emerson was the poet
+and prophet of man's moral nature, and it is this nature&mdash;our finest
+and highest human sensibilities and aspirations toward justice and
+truth&mdash;that has been so raided and trampled upon by the chief
+malefactor and world outlaw in the present war.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p>Men who write Journals are usually men of certain marked traits&mdash;they
+are idealists, they love solitude rather than society, they are
+self-conscious, and they love to write. At least this seems to be true
+of the men of the past century who left Journals of permanent literary
+worth&mdash;Amiel, Emerson, and Thoreau. Amiel's Journal has more the
+character of a diary than has Emerson's or Thoreau's, though it is
+also a record of thoughts as well as of days. Emerson left more
+unprinted matter than he chose to publish during his lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>The Journals of Emerson and Thoreau are largely made up of left-overs
+from their published works, and hence as literary material, when
+compared with their other volumes, are of secondary im<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>portance. You
+could not make another "Walden" out of Thoreau's Journals, nor build
+up another chapter on "Self-Reliance," or on "Character," or on the
+"Over-Soul," from Emerson's, though there are fragments here and there
+in both that are on a level with their best work.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles wondered that he did
+not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate
+habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles
+evidently was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly
+more fond of real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an
+orator and could not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write
+Journals, as I have said, are usually men of solitary habits, and
+their Journal largely takes the place of social converse. Amiel,
+Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely souls, lacking in social gifts, and
+seeking relief in the society of their own thoughts. Such men go to
+their Journals as other men go to their clubs. They love to be alone
+with themselves, and dread to be benumbed or drained of their mental
+force by uncongenial persons. To such a man his Journal becomes his
+duplicate self and he says to it what he could not say to his nearest
+friend. It becomes both an altar and a confessional. Especially is
+this true of deeply religious souls such as the men I have named. They
+commune, through their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> Journals, with the demons that attend them.
+Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence, "There is but one thing
+needful&mdash;to possess God," and Emerson's Journal in its most
+characteristic pages is always a search after God, or the highest
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>"After a day of humiliation and stripes," he writes, "if I can write
+it down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of
+joy, the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given
+me by all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of
+humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end."
+"I write my journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name
+of society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen."</p>
+
+<p>He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. At the age of thirty
+he said he had "no skill to live with men; that is, such men as the
+world is made of; and such as I delight in I seldom find." Again he
+says, aged thirty-two, "I study the art of solitude; I yield me as
+gracefully as I can to destiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a
+settled thing" that he and society shall be "nothing to each other."
+He takes to his Journal instead. It is his house of refuge.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he constantly laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the
+poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and
+of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> "I have no animal
+spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for
+many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run
+for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But he does
+not run away; he often takes it out in hoeing in his garden: "My good
+hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to
+bite my enemies." "In smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my temper.
+In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed
+deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said
+that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him
+resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his
+temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and
+trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no
+longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a
+visitor is by." We welcome these and many another bit of
+self-analysis: "I was born with a seeing eye and not a helping hand. I
+can only comfort my friends by thought, and not by love or aid." "I
+was made a hermit and am content with my lot. I pluck golden fruit
+from rare meetings with wise men." Margaret Fuller told him he seemed
+always on stilts: "It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my
+own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to
+me.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech with
+such. You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of words; and
+the behavior is as awkward and proud."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with
+explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and
+agreeable influence stealing like a scent of a flower, or the sight of
+a new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied
+by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose
+thoughts I stimulate."</p>
+
+<p>Here Emerson did center in himself and never apologized. His gospel of
+self-reliance came natural to him. He was emphatically self, without a
+trace of selfishness. He went abroad to study himself more than other
+people&mdash;to note the effect of Europe on himself. He says, "I believe
+it's sound philosophy that wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the
+sole object we study and learn. Montaigne said himself was all he
+knew. Myself is much more than I know, and yet I know nothing else."
+In Paris he wrote to his brother William, "A lecture at the Sorbonne
+is far less useful to me than a lecture that I write myself"; and as
+for the literary society in Paris, though he thought longingly of it,
+yet he said, "Probably in years it would avail me nothing."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Journals are mainly a record of his thoughts and not of his days,
+except so far as the days brought him ideas. Here and there the
+personal element creeps in&mdash;some journey, some bit of experience, some
+visitor, or walks with Channing, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jones Very, and
+others; some lecturing experience, his class meetings, his travels
+abroad and chance meetings with distinguished men. But all the more
+purely personal element makes up but a small portion of the ten thick
+volumes of his Journal. Most readers, I fancy, will wish that the
+proportion of these things were greater. We all have thoughts and
+speculations of our own, but we can never hear too much about a man's
+real life.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New
+England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He
+is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald,
+the poet-seer. He is the poet and prophet of the moral ideal. His main
+significance is religious, though nothing could be farther from him
+than creeds and doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical formalism.
+There is an atmosphere of sanctity about him that we do not feel about
+any other poet and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit of
+Oriental mysticism and bardic fervor grafted upon the shrewd,
+parsimonious, New England puritanic stock. The stress and wild,
+uncertain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> melody of his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. No
+writing surpasses his in the extent to which it takes hold of the
+concrete, the real, the familiar, and none surpasses his in its
+elusive, mystical suggestiveness, and its cryptic character. It is
+Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and Oriental devoutness,
+pantheism, and symbolism on the other. Its cheerful and sunny light of
+the common day enhances instead of obscures the light that falls from
+the highest heaven of the spirit. Saadi or Hafiz or Omar might have
+fathered him, but only a New England mother could have borne him.
+Probably more than half his poetry escapes the average reader; his
+longer poems, like "Initial, D&aelig;monic, and Celestial Love," "Monadnoc,"
+"Merlin," "The Sphinx," "The World-Soul," set the mind groping for the
+invisible rays of the spectrum of human thought and knowledge, but
+many of the shorter poems, such as "The Problem," "Each and All,"
+"Sea-Shore," "The Snow-Storm," "Musketaquid," "Days," "Song of
+Nature," "My Garden," "Boston Hymn," "Concord Hymn," and others, are
+among the most precious things in our literature.</p>
+
+<p>As Emerson was a bard among poets, a seer among philosophers, a
+prophet among essayists, an oracle among ethical teachers, so, as I
+have said, was he a solitary among men. He walked alone. He somewhere
+refers to his "porcupine impossi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>bility of contact with men." His very
+thoughts are not social among themselves, they separate. Each stands
+alone; often they hardly have a bowing acquaintance; over and over
+their juxtaposition is mechanical and not vital. The redeeming feature
+is that they can afford to stand alone, like shafts of marble or
+granite.</p>
+
+<p>The force and worth of his page is not in its logical texture, but in
+the beauty and truth of its isolated sentences and paragraphs. There
+is little inductive or deductive reasoning in his books, but a series
+of affirmations whose premises and logical connection the reader does
+not always see.</p>
+
+<p>He records that his hearers found his lectures fine and poetical but a
+little puzzling. "One thought them as good as a kaleidoscope." The
+solid men of business said that they did not understand them but their
+daughters did.</p>
+
+<p>The lecture committee in Illinois in 1856 told him that the people
+wanted a hearty laugh. "The stout Illinoian," not finding the laugh,
+"after a short trial walks out of the hall." I think even his best
+Eastern audiences were always a good deal puzzled. The lecturer never
+tried to meet them halfway. He says himself of one of his lectures, "I
+found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good
+house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." The
+absence of the stairs in his house&mdash;of an easy entrance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> into the
+heart of the subject, and of a few consecutive and leading
+ideas&mdash;will, in a measure, account for the bewilderment of his
+hearers. When I heard Emerson in 1871 before audiences in Baltimore
+and Washington, I could see and feel this uncertainty and bewilderment
+in his auditors.</p>
+
+<p>His lectures could not be briefly summarized. They had no central
+thought. You could give a sample sentence, but not the one sentence
+that commanded all the others. Whatever he called it, his theme, as he
+himself confesses, was always fundamentally the same: "In all my
+lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the
+private man. This the people accept readily enough and even with loud
+commendations as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or
+Literature, or the Household, but the moment I call it Religion they
+are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which
+they receive everywhere else to a new class of facts."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other points had been
+considered, was the religious test: Was he truly religious? Was his
+pole star the moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever with him?
+But few contemporary authors met his requirements in this respect.
+After his first visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge,
+Wordsworth, and others, he said they were all second-or third-rate men
+because of their want<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> of the religious sense. They all looked
+backward to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a present
+revelation.</p>
+
+<p>His conception of the divine will as <i>the eternal tendency to the good
+of the whole, active in every atom, every moment</i>, is one of the
+thoughts in which religion and science meet and join hands.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p>In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their
+making&mdash;the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebul&aelig; and
+star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion
+lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his
+printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of
+&aelig;sthetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising,
+I think, than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and
+show the 'prentice hand more.</p>
+
+<p>The themes around which his mind revolved all his life&mdash;nature, God,
+the soul&mdash;and their endless variations and implications, recur again
+and again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has
+new thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners,
+Experience, Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects
+every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new
+images. His mind had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> marked centrality, and fundamental problems were
+always near at hand with him. He could not get away from them. He
+renounced the pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less
+to him, but because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the
+feeling of the Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth
+under his feet.</p>
+
+<p>The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through
+his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his
+speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a
+<i>m&eacute;lange</i> they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from
+intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer
+neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary
+or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings
+after spiritual truths, and a hundred other things, are always marked
+by what he says that Macaulay did not possess&mdash;elevation of mind&mdash;and
+an abiding love for the real values in life and letters.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled
+and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say
+nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as
+silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception
+of the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine
+humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose. Here
+is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of
+thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows
+what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the
+mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no
+more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his reader
+will remember, begins in this wise:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of thee from the hilltop looking down."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says: "Nothing is beautiful
+alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole." In the poem above
+referred to this becomes:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All are needed by each one;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing is fair or good alone."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In 1856 we find the first stanza of his 'beautiful "Two Rivers,"
+written in prose form: "Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the
+music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee as
+those through Concord plain." The substance of the next four stanzas
+is in prose form also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I
+love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air,
+and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the
+inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> in
+summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who
+can hear it"; and so on. In the poem these sentences become:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thou in thy narrow banks are pent:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The stream I love unbounded goes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through flood and sea and firmament;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through light, through life, it forward flows.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I see the inundation sweet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I hear the spending of the stream<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through love and thought, through power and dream."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic of his own work. He
+knew when he had struck fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was
+as exacting with himself as with others. His conception of the
+character and function of the poet was so high that he found the
+greatest poets wanting. The poet is one of his three or four
+ever-recurring themes. He is the divine man. He is bard and prophet,
+seer and savior. He is the acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of
+insight into the method of nature, and devoid of religious emotion,
+was to him but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe
+"the jingle man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The
+intellectual content of Poe's works <i>was</i> negligible. He was a wizard
+with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our
+knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in
+life, he did not contribute to our con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>tentment in the world&mdash;the
+bread of life was not in him. What was in him was mastery over the
+architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in Shelley for the same
+reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the
+term,&mdash;the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought
+empty,&mdash;was his final test of any man. Unless there was something
+fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep
+of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of
+the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson
+demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his
+time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New England. It
+was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested
+Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it
+"the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to
+American literature."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson said of himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in
+the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have
+written." We must set this statement down to one of those fits of
+dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods that often came
+upon him. What he meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier
+age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and
+grandfather, but coming under the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and
+Wordsworth, and other liberating influences of the nineteenth century,
+he was bound to be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of
+his immoderate fondness for writing. Writing was the passion of his
+life, his supreme joy, and he went through the world with the writer's
+eye and ear and hand always on duty. And his contribution to the
+literature of man's higher moral and &aelig;sthetic nature is one of the
+most valuable of the age in which he lived.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+<p>Apart from the account of his travels and other personal experiences,
+the Journals are mainly made up of discussions of upwards of fifty
+subjects of general and fundamental interest, ranging from art to war,
+and looked at from many and diverse points of view. Of these subjects
+three are dominant, recurring again and again in each volume. These
+are nature, literature, and religion. Emerson's main interests
+centered in these themes. Using these terms in their broadest sense,
+this is true, I think, of all his published books. Emerson was an
+idealist, first, last, and all the time, and he was a literary artist,
+or aimed to be, first, last, and all the time, and in the same measure
+and to the same extent was he a devout religious soul, using the term
+religion as he sometimes uses it, as a feeling of the Infinite.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are one hundred and seventy-six paragraphs, long and short,
+given to literature and art, and one hundred and sixty given to
+religious subjects, and over thirty given to nature. It is interesting
+to note that he devotes more paragraphs to woman than to man; and more
+to society than to solitude, though only to express his dislike of the
+former and his love for the latter. There are more thoughts about
+science than about metaphysics, more about war than about love, more
+about poetry than about philosophy, more on beauty than on knowledge,
+more on walking than on books. There are three times as many
+paragraphs on nature (thirty-three) as on the Bible, all of which is
+significant of his attitude of mind.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson was a preacher without a creed, a scholar devoted to
+super-literary ends, an essayist occupied with thoughts of God, the
+soul, nature, the moral law&mdash;always the literary artist looking for
+the right word, the right image, but always bending his art to the
+service of religious thought. He was one of the most religious souls
+of his country and time, or of any country and time, yet was disowned
+by all the sects and churches of his time. He made religion too
+pervasive, and too inclusive to suit them; the stream at once got out
+of its banks and inundated all their old landmarks. In the last
+analysis of his thought, his ultimate theme was God, and yet he never
+allowed himself to at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>tempt any definite statement about God&mdash;refusing
+always to discuss God in terms of human personality. When Emerson
+wrote "Representative Men" he felt that Jesus was the Representative
+Man whom he ought to sketch, "but the task required great
+gifts&mdash;steadiest insight and perfect temper; else the consciousness of
+want of sympathy in the audience would make one petulant and sore in
+spite of himself."</p>
+
+<p>There are few great men in history or philosophy or literature or
+poetry or divinity whose names do not appear more or less frequently
+in the Journals. For instance, in the Journal of 1864 the names or
+works of one hundred and seventeen men appear, ranging from Zeno to
+Jones Very. And this is a fair average. Of course the names of his
+friends and contemporaries appear the most frequently. The name that
+recurs the most often is that of his friend and neighbor Thoreau.
+There are ninety-seven paragraphs in which the Hermit of Walden is the
+main or the secondary figure. He discusses him and criticizes him, and
+quotes from him, always showing an abiding interest in, and affection
+for, him. Thoreau was in so many ways so characteristically Emersonian
+that one wonders what influence it was in the place or time that gave
+them both, with their disparity of ages, so nearly the same stamp.
+Emerson is by far the more imposing figure, the broader, the wiser,
+the more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> tolerant, the more representative; he stood four-square to
+the world in a sense that Thoreau did not. Thoreau presented a pretty
+thin edge to the world. If he stood broadside to anything, it was to
+nature. He was undoubtedly deeply and permanently influenced by
+Emerson both in his mental habits and in his manner of life, yet the
+main part of him was original and unadulterated Thoreau. His literary
+style is in many respects better than that of Emerson; its logical
+texture is better; it has more continuity, more evolution, it is more
+flexible and adaptive; it is the medium of a lesser mind, but of a
+mind more thoroughly imbued with the influence of the classical
+standards of modern literature. I believe "Walden" will last as long
+as anything Emerson has written, if not longer. It is the fruit of a
+sweeter solitude and detachment from the world than Emerson ever knew,
+a private view of nature, and has a fireside and campside quality that
+essays fashioned for the lecture platform do not have. Emerson's pages
+are more like mosaics, richly inlaid with gems of thought and poetry
+and philosophy, while Thoreau's are more like a closely woven,
+many-colored textile.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's "Maine Woods" I look upon as one of the best books of the
+kind in English literature. It has just the right tone and quality,
+like Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast"&mdash;a tone and quality that
+sometimes come to a man when he makes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> less effort to write than to
+see and feel truly. He does not aim to exploit the woods, but to live
+with them and possess himself of their spirit. The Cape Cod book also
+has a similar merit; it almost leaves a taste of the salt sea spray
+upon your lips. Emerson criticizes Thoreau freely, and justly, I
+think. As a person he lacked sweetness and winsomeness; as a writer he
+was at times given to a meaningless exaggeration.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of
+unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon
+learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word
+and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild
+mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow
+and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for
+their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and
+Paris. With the constant inclination to dispraise cities and
+civilization, he yet can find no way to know woods and
+woodmen except by paralleling them with towns and townsmen.
+Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it makes me
+nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.</p>
+
+<p>I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, but he
+does not disclose new matter. I am very familiar with all
+his thoughts,&mdash;they are my own quite originally drest. But
+if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into
+circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was
+created to say. I said to him what I often feel, I only know
+three persons who seem to me fully to see this law of
+reciprocity or compensation&mdash;himself, Alcott, and myself:
+and 't is odd that we should all be neighbors, for in the
+wide land or the wide earth I do not know another who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> seems
+to have it as deeply and originally as these three
+Gothamites.</p></div>
+
+<p>A remark of Emerson's upon Thoreau calls up the image of John Muir to
+me: "If I knew only Thoreau, I should think co&ouml;peration of good men
+impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth,
+for comfort, and joy?" Then, after crediting Thoreau with some
+admirable gifts,&mdash;centrality, penetration, strong understanding,&mdash;he
+proceeds to say, "all his resources of wit and invention are lost to
+me, in every experiment, year after year, that I make to hold
+intercourse with his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight
+you with, and the time and temper wasted."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson met John Muir in the Yosemite in 1871 and was evidently
+impressed with him. Somewhere he gives a list of his men which begins
+with Carlyle and ends with Muir. Here was another man with more
+character than intellect, as Emerson said of Carlyle, and with the
+flavor of the wild about him. Muir was not too compliant and
+deferential. He belonged to the sayers of No. Contradiction was the
+breath of his nostrils. He had the Scottish chariness of bestowing
+praise or approval, and could surely give Emerson the sense of being
+<i>met</i> which he demanded. Writing was irksome to Muir as it was to
+Carlyle, but in monologue, in an attentive company, he shone;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> not a
+great thinker, but a mind strongly characteristic. His philosophy
+rarely rose above that of the Sunday school, but his moral fiber was
+very strong, and his wit ready and keen. In conversation and in daily
+intercourse he was a man not easily put aside. Emerson found him
+deeply read in nature lore and with some suggestion about his look and
+manner of the wild and rugged solitude in which he lived so much.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson was alive to everything around him; every object touched some
+spring in his mind; the church spire, the shadows on the windows at
+night, the little girl with her pail of whortleberries, the passing
+bee, bird, butterfly, the clouds, the streams, the trees&mdash;all found
+his mind open to any suggestion they might make. He is intent on the
+now and the here. He listens to every newcomer with an expectant air.
+He is full of the present. I once saw him at West Point during the
+June examinations. How alert and eager he was! The bored and
+perfunctory air of his fellow members on the Board of Visitors
+contrasted sharply with his active, expectant interest.</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+<p>He lived absolutely in his own day and generation, and no contemporary
+writer of real worth escaped his notice. He is never lavish in his
+praise, but is for the most part just and discrimi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>nating. Walt
+Whitman is mentioned only thrice in the Journals, Lowell only twice,
+Longfellow once or twice, Matthew Arnold three times, but Jones Very
+is quoted and discussed sixteen times. Very was a poet who had no fast
+colors; he has quite faded out in our day.</p>
+
+<p>Of Matthew Arnold Emerson says: "I should like to call attention to
+the critical superiority of Arnold, his excellent ear for style, and
+the singular poverty of his poetry, that in fact he has written but
+one poem, 'Thyrsis,' and that on an inspiration borrowed from Milton."
+Few good readers, I think, will agree with Emerson about the poverty
+of Arnold's poetry. His "Dover Beach" is one of the first-rate poems
+in English literature. Emerson has words of praise for Lowell&mdash;thinks
+the production of such a man "a certificate of good elements in the
+soil, climate, and institutions of America," but in 1868 he declares
+that his new poems show an advance "in talent rather than in poetic
+tone"; that the advance "rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than
+the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a
+new poem, and which is unanalysable, and makes the merit of an ode of
+Collins, or Gray, or Wordsworth, or Herbert, or Byron." He evidently
+thought little of Lowell's severe arraignment of him in a college poem
+which he wrote soon after the delivery of the famous "Divinity School<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+Address." The current of religious feeling in Cambridge set so
+strongly against Emerson for several years that Lowell doubtless
+merely reflected it. Why did he not try to deflect it, or to check it?
+And yet, when Emerson's friends did try to defend him, it was against
+his will. He hated to be defended in a newspaper: "As long as all that
+is said is against me I feel a certain austere assurance of success,
+but as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one
+that lies unprotected before his enemies."</p>
+
+<p>Next to Thoreau, Emerson devotes to Alcott more space in his Journals
+than to any other man. It is all telling interpretation, description,
+and criticism. Truly, Alcott must have had some extraordinary power to
+have made such a lasting impression upon Emerson. When my friend Myron
+Benton and I first met Emerson in 1863 at West Point, Emerson spoke of
+Alcott very pointedly, and said we should never miss a chance to hear
+his conversation, but that when he put pen to paper all his
+inspiration left him. His thoughts faded as soon as he tried to set
+them down. There must have been some curious illusion about it all on
+the part of Emerson, as no fragment of Alcott's wonderful talk worth
+preserving has come down to us. The waters of the sea are blue, but
+not in the pailful. There must have been something analogous in
+Alcott's conversations, some total effect<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> which the details do not
+justify, or something in the atmosphere which he created, that gave
+certain of his hearers the conviction that they were voyaging with him
+through the celestial depths.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious fact that Alcott "could not recall one word or part
+of his own conversation, or of any one's, let the expression be never
+so happy." And he seems to have hypnotized Emerson in the same way.
+"He made here some majestic utterances, but so inspired me that even I
+forgot the words often." "Olympian dreams," Emerson calls his
+talk&mdash;moonshine, it appears at this distance.</p>
+
+<p>"His discourse soars to a wonderful height," says Emerson, "so
+regular, so lucid, so playful, so new and disdainful of all boundaries
+of tradition and experience, that the hearers seem no longer to have
+bodies or material gravity, but almost they can mount into the air at
+pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system. I say
+this of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he
+loses, in my judgment, all his power, and I derive more pain than
+pleasure from the perusal." Some illusion surely that made the effort
+to report him like an attempt to capture the rainbow, only to find it
+common water.</p>
+
+<p>In 1842 Emerson devotes eight pages in his Journal to an analysis of
+Alcott, and very masterly they are. He ends with these sentences:
+"This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more
+such persons to exist."</p>
+
+<p>"When Alcott wrote from England that he was bringing home Wright and
+Lane, I wrote him a letter which I required him to show them, saying
+that they might safely trust his theories, but that they should put no
+trust whatever in his statement of facts. When they all arrived
+here&mdash;he and his victims&mdash;I asked them if he showed them the letter;
+they answered that he did; so I was clear."</p>
+
+<p>Another neighbor who greatly impressed Emerson, and of whom he has
+much to say, was Father Taylor, the sailor preacher of Boston. There
+is nothing better in the Journals than the pages devoted to
+description and analysis of this remarkable man. To Emerson he
+suggested the wealth of Nature. He calls him a "godly poet, the
+Shakespear of the sailor and the poor." "I delight in his great
+personality, the way and sweep of the man which, like a frigate's way,
+takes up for the time the centre of the ocean, paves it with a white
+street, and all the lesser craft 'do curtsey to him, do him
+reverence.'" A man all emotion, all love, all inspiration, but, like
+Alcott, impossible to justify your high estimate of by any quotation.
+His power was all personal living power, and could not be transferred
+to print. The livid embers of his discourse became dead charcoal when
+reported by another, or, as Emerson more happily puts it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> "A creature
+of instinct, his colors are all opaline and dove's-neck-lustre and can
+only be seen at a distance. Examine them, and they disappear." More
+exactly they are visible only at a certain angle. Of course this is in
+a measure true of all great oratory&mdash;it is not so much the words as
+the man.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of Father Taylor in connection with Alcott, Emerson says that
+one was the fool of his ideas, and the other of his fancy.</p>
+
+<p>An intellectual child of Emerson's was Ellery Channing, but he seems
+to have inherited in an exaggerated form only the faults of his
+father. Channing appears to have been a crotchety, disgruntled person,
+always aiming at walking on his head instead of on his heels. Emerson
+quotes many of his sayings, not one of them worth preserving, all
+marked by a kind of violence and disjointedness. They had many walks
+together.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson was so fond of paradoxes and extreme statements that both
+Channing and Thoreau seem to have vied with each other in uttering
+hard or capricious sayings when in his presence. Emerson catches at a
+vivid and picturesque statement, if it has even a fraction of truth in
+it, like a fly-catcher at a fly.</p>
+
+<p>A fair sample of Channing's philosophy is the following: "He persists
+in his bad opinion of orchards and farming, declares that the only
+success he ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> had with a farmer was that he once paid a cent for a
+russet apple; and farming, he thinks, is an attempt to outwit God with
+a hoe; that they plant a great many potatoes with much ado, but it is
+doubtful if they ever get the seed back." Channing seems to have
+dropped such pearls of wisdom as that all along the road in their
+walks! Another sample of Channing's philosophy which Emerson thinks
+worthy of quoting. They were walking over the fields in November.
+Channing complained of the poverty of invention on the part of Nature:
+"'Why, they had frozen water last year; why should they do it again?
+Therefore it was so easy to be an artist, because <i>they</i> do the same
+thing always,' and therefore he only wants time to make him perfect in
+the imitation."</p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+<p>Emerson was occupied entirely with the future, as Carlyle was occupied
+entirely with the past. Emerson shared the open expectation of the new
+world, Carlyle struggled under the gloom and pessimism of the old&mdash;a
+greater character, but a far less lambent and helpful spirit. Emerson
+seems to have been obsessed with the idea that a new and greater man
+was to appear. He looked into the face of every newcomer with an
+earnest, expectant air, as if he might prove to be the new man: this
+thought inspires the last stanzas of his "Song of Nature":<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Let war and trade and creeds and song<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blend, ripen race on race,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sunburnt world a man shall breed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of all the zones and countless days.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My oldest force is good as new,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the fresh rose on yonder thorn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gives back the bending heavens in dew."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Emerson was under no illusion as to the effect of distance. He knew
+the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed
+and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of
+distance&mdash;an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The
+everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the
+alchemy of time and space to work in. It has been said that all
+martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering. Holy ground is not holy when
+we walk upon it. The now and the here seem cheap and commonplace.
+Emerson knew that "a score of airy miles will smooth rough Monadnoc to
+a gem," but he knew also that it would not change the character of
+Monadnoc. He knew that the past and the present, the near and the far,
+were made of one stuff. He united the courage of science with the
+sensibility of poetry. He would not be defrauded of the value of the
+present hour, or of the thoughts which he and other men think, or of
+the lives which they live to-day. "I will tell you how you can enrich
+me&mdash;if you will recommend to-day to me." His doctrine of
+self-reliance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> which he preached in season and out of season, was
+based upon the conviction that Nature and the soul do not become old
+and outworn, that the great characters and great thoughts of the past
+were the achievements of men who trusted themselves before custom or
+law. The sun shines to-day; the constellations hang there in the
+heavens the same as of old. God is as near us as ever He was&mdash;why
+should we take our revelations at second hand? No other writer who has
+used the English language has ever preached such a heroic doctrine of
+self-trust, or set the present moment so high in the circle of the
+years, in the diadem of the days.</p>
+
+<p>It is an old charge against Emerson that he was deficient in human
+sympathy. He makes it against himself; the ties of association which
+most persons find so binding seemed to hold him very lightly. There
+was always a previous question with him&mdash;the moral value of one's
+associations. Unless you sicken and die to some purpose, why such an
+ado about it? Unless the old ruin of a house harbored great men and
+great women, or was the scene of heroic deeds, why linger around it?
+The purely human did not appeal to him; history interested him only as
+it threw light upon to-day. History is a record of the universal mind;
+hence of your mind, of my mind&mdash;"all the facts of history pre&euml;xist in
+the mind as laws." "What Plato thought, every man may think. What a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he
+can understand." "All that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of
+a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself"; and so
+on, seeing in history only biography, and interested in the past only
+as he can link it with the present. Always an intellectual interest,
+never a human or an emotional one. His Journal does not reveal him
+going back to the old places, or lingering fondly over the memories of
+his youth. He speaks of his "unpleasing boyhood," of his unhappy
+recollections, etc., not because of unkindness or hardships
+experienced, but because of certain shortcomings or deficiencies of
+character and purpose, of which he is conscious&mdash;"some meanness," or
+"unfounded pride" which may lower him in the opinion of others. Pride,
+surely, but not ignoble pride.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson's expectation of the great poet, the great man, is voiced in
+his "Representative Men": "If the companions of our childhood should
+turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not
+surprise us." On the contrary, I think it would surprise most of us
+very much. It is from the remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great
+things. We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. But with Emerson
+the contrary seems to have been the case. He met the new person or
+took up the new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> of
+mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue
+bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His
+optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his
+literary firmament have quite faded out&mdash;all of them, I think, but
+Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the
+coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to "Leaves
+of Grass"&mdash;a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had
+got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he
+had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him
+in Washington in 1871 or '72, he said he wished Whitman's friends
+would "quarrel" with him more about his poems, as some years earlier
+he himself had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman walked for
+hours on Boston Common, he remonstrating with Whitman about certain
+passages in "Leaves of Grass" which he tried in vain to persuade him
+to omit in the next edition. Whitman would persist in being Whitman.
+Now, counseling such a course to a man in an essay on "Self-Reliance"
+is quite a different thing from entirely approving of it in a concrete
+example.</p>
+
+<p>In 1840 Emerson writes: "A notice of modern literature ought to
+include (ought it not?) a notice of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor,
+of Bettina, of Sampson Reed." The first three names surely, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span> who
+is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in
+such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a
+Swedenborgian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, from which
+Emerson quotes, and to which he often alludes, a book that has long
+been forgotten; and is not Bettina forgotten also?</p>
+
+<p>Emerson found more in Jones Very than has any one else; the poems of
+Very that he included in "Parnassus" have little worth. A
+comparatively unknown and now forgotten English writer also moved
+Emerson unduly. Listen to this: "In England, Landor, De Quincey,
+Carlyle, three men of original literary genius; but the scholar, the
+catholic, cosmic intellect, Bacon's own son, the Lord Chief Justice on
+the Muse's Bench is"&mdash;who do you think, in 1847?&mdash;"Wilkinson"! Garth
+Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson says of him in
+"English Traits": "There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic
+roll, not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought
+to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality." To bid a man's stock
+up like that may not, in the long run, be good for the man, but it
+shows what a generous, optimistic critic Emerson was.</p>
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+<p>In his published works Emerson is chary of the personal element; he
+says: "We can hardly speak<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> of our own experiences and the names of
+our friends sparingly enough." In his books he would be only an
+impersonal voice; the man Emerson, as such, he hesitated to intrude.
+But in the Journals we get much more of the personal element, as would
+be expected. We get welcome glimpses of the man, of his moods, of his
+diversions, of his home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see him
+as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a member of a rural
+community. We see him in his walks and talks with friends and
+neighbors&mdash;with Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, and
+others&mdash;and get snatches of the conversations. We see the growth of
+his mind, his gradual emancipation from the bondage of the orthodox
+traditions.</p>
+
+<p>Very welcome is the growth of Emerson's appreciation of Wordsworth. As
+a divinity student he was severe in his criticism of Wordsworth, but
+as his own genius unfolded more and more he saw the greatness of
+Wordsworth, till in middle life he pronounced his famous Ode the
+high-water mark of English literature. Yet after that his fondness for
+a telling, picturesque figure allows him to inquire if Wordsworth is
+not like a bell with a wooden tongue. All this is an admirable
+illustration of his familiar dictum: "Speak what you think now in hard
+words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,
+though it contradict everything you say to-day."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the Journals we see Emerson going up and down the country in his
+walks, on his lecture tours in the West, among his neighbors, wherever
+and whenever he goes as alert and watchful as a sportsman. He was a
+sportsman of a new kind; his game was ideas. He was always looking for
+hints and images to aid him in his writings. He was like a bird
+perpetually building a nest; every moment he wanted new material, and
+everything that diverted him from his quest was an unwelcome
+interruption. He had no great argument to build, no system of
+philosophy to organize and formulate, no plot, like a novelist, to
+work out, no controversy on hand&mdash;he wanted pertinent, concrete, and
+striking facts and incidents to weave in his essay on Fate, or
+Circles, or Character, or Farming, or Worship, or Wealth&mdash;something
+that his intuitive and disjointed habit of thought could seize upon
+and make instant use of.</p>
+
+<p>We see him walking in free converse with his friends and neighbors,
+receiving them in his own house, friendly and expectant, but always
+standing aloof, never giving himself heartily to them, exchanging
+ideas with them across a gulf, prizing their wit and their wisdom, but
+cold and reserved toward them personally, destitute of all feeling of
+comradeship, an eye, an ear, a voice, an intellect, but rarely, or in
+a minor degree, a heart, or a feeling of fellowship&mdash;a giving and a
+taking quite above<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> and beyond the reach of articulate speech. When
+they had had their say, he was done with them. When you have found a
+man's limitations, he says, it is all up with him. After your friend
+has fired his shot, good-by. The pearl in the oyster is what is
+wanted, and not the oyster. "If I love you, what is that to you?" is a
+saying that could have been coined only in Concord. It seems to me
+that the basis of all wholesome human attachment is character, not
+intellect. Admiration and love are quite different things.
+Transcendental friendships seem to be cold, bloodless affairs.</p>
+
+<p>One feels as if he wanted to squeeze or shake Emerson to see if he
+cannot get some normal human love out of him, a love that looks for
+nothing beyond love, a love which is its own excuse for being, a love
+that is not a bargain&mdash;simple, common, disinterested human love. But
+Emerson said, "I like man but not men."</p>
+
+<p>"You would have me love you," he writes in his Journal. "What shall I
+love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought
+and said? Well, whilst you were thinking and saying them, but not now.
+I see no possibility of loving anything but what now is, and is
+becoming; your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your
+opening thought, your prayer, I can love&mdash;but what else?"</p>
+
+<p>Can you not love your friend for himself alone,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> for his kinship with
+you, without taking an inventory of his moral and intellectual
+qualities; for something in him that makes you happy in his presence?
+The personal attraction which Whitman felt between himself and certain
+types of men, and which is the basis of most manly friendships,
+Emerson probably never felt. One cannot conceive of him as caring
+deeply for any person who could not teach him something. He says, "I
+speculate on virtue, not burn with love." Again, "A rush of thoughts
+is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to me." Pure
+intellectual values seem alone to have counted with Emerson and his
+followers. With men his question was, "What can you teach me?" With
+Nature, "What new image or suggestion have you got for me to-day?"
+With science, "What ethical value do your facts hold?" With natural
+history, "Can I translate your facts and laws into my supernatural
+history?" With civil history, "Will your record help me to understand
+my own day and land?" The quintessence of things was what he always
+sought.</p>
+
+<p>"We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves," Emerson wrote in
+1842, and then added, "We lose time in trying to be like others." One
+is reminded of passages in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, wherein
+each tried to persuade the other to be like himself. Carlyle would
+have Emerson "become concrete and write in prose the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> straightest
+way," would have him come down from his "perilous altitude,"
+"soliloquizing on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude,
+where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness
+and only <i>the man</i> and the stars and the earth are visible&mdash;come down
+into your own poor Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its
+blind, or half-blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its
+tears, and try to evolve in some measure the hidden God-like that lies
+in it." "I wish you would take an American hero, one whom you really
+love, and give us a History of him&mdash;make an artistic bronze statue (in
+good words) of his Life and him!" Emerson's reply in effect is,
+Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes&mdash;give me "the culled
+results, the quintessence of private conviction, a <i>liber veritatis</i>,
+a few sentences, hints of the final moral you draw from so much
+penetrating inquest into past and present men."</p>
+
+<p>In reply to Carlyle's criticism of the remote and abstract character
+of his work, Emerson says, "What you say now and heretofore respecting
+the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I
+hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not
+know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal
+right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it
+of the last act of Congress."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+<p>Emerson's love of nature was one of his ruling passions. It took him
+to the country to live, it led him to purchase Walden Pond and the
+Walden woods; it led him forth upon his almost daily walks, winter and
+summer, to the fields and the woods. His was the love of the poet and
+the idealist, of the man who communes with Nature, and finds a moral
+and an intellectual tonic in her works. The major part of his poetry
+is inspired by Nature. He complains of Tennyson's poetry that it has
+few or no wood notes. His first book, "Nature," is steeped in
+religious and poetic emotion. He said in his Journal in 1841: "All my
+thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath
+of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. Shall I not then
+call my little book Forest Essays?" He finally called it "Nature." He
+loves the "hermit birds that harbor in the woods. I can do well for
+weeks with no other society than the partridge and the jay, my daily
+company."</p>
+
+<p>"I have known myself entertained by a single dew-drop, or an icicle,
+by a liatris, or a fungus, and seen God revealed in the shadow of a
+leaf." He says that going to Nature is more than a medicine, it is
+health. "As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel, that
+nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me
+my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing
+on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted
+into the infinite space, I became happy in my universal relations."
+This sentiment of his also recalls his lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A woodland walk,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Salve my worst wounds."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If life were long enough, among my thousand and one works
+should be a book of Nature whereof Howitt's <i>Seasons</i> should
+not be so much the model as the parody. It should contain
+the natural history of the woods around my shifting camp for
+every month in the year. It should tie their astronomy,
+botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry
+together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on
+his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins,
+bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds
+of the birch and the oak; in every one of the last is a
+star. The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river
+flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this composite,
+collective beauty which refuses to be analysed. Nothing is
+beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole.
+Learn the history of a craneberry. Mark the day when the
+pine cones and acorns fall.</p>
+
+<p>I go out daily and nightly to feed my eyes on the horizon
+and the sky, and come to feel the want of this scope as I do
+of water for my washing.</p>
+
+<p>What learned I this morning in the woods, the oracular
+woods? Wise are they, the ancient nymphs; pleasing, sober,
+melancholy truth say those untameable savages, the pines.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He frequently went to Walden Pond of an afternoon and read Goethe or
+some other great author.</p>
+
+<p>There was an element of mysticism in Emerson's love of nature as there
+is in that of all true nature-lovers. None knew better than he that
+nature is not all birds and flowers. His love of nature was that of
+the poet and artist, and not that of the scientist or naturalist.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you I love the peeping of the Hyla in a pond in April, or the
+evening cry of the whippoorwill, better than all the bellowing of all
+the Bulls of Bashan, or all the turtles of all Palestine."</p>
+
+<p>Any personal details about his life which Emerson gives us are always
+welcome. We learn that his different winter courses of lectures in
+Boston, usually ten of them, were attended on an average by about five
+hundred persons, and netted him about five hundred dollars.</p>
+
+<p>When he published a new volume, he was very liberal with presentation
+copies. Of his first volume of poems, published in 1846, he sent
+eighty copies to his friends. When "May-Day" was published in 1867, he
+sent fifty copies to friends; one of them went to Walt Whitman. I saw
+it the day it came. It was in a white dress (silk, I think); very
+beautiful. He sent a copy of his first volume of "Nature" to Landor.
+One would like to know what Landor said in reply. The copy he sent to
+Carlyle I saw in the Scot's library, in Cheyne Row, in 1871.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>IX</h3>
+<p>Emerson was so drawn to the racy and original that it seems as if
+original sin had a certain fascination for him. The austere, the
+Puritanical Emerson, the heir of eight generations of clergy-men, the
+man who did not like to have Frederika Bremer play the piano in his
+house on Sunday, seems at times to covet the "swear-words" of the
+common people. They itch at his ears, they have flavor and reality. He
+sometimes records them in his Journal; for example, this remark of the
+Canadian wood-chopper who cut wood for his neighbor&mdash;he preferred to
+work by the job rather than by the day&mdash;the days were "so damned
+long!"</p>
+
+<p>The mob, Emerson says, is always interesting: "A blacksmith, a
+truckman, a farmer, we follow into the bar-room and watch with
+eagerness what they shall say." "Cannot the stinging dialect of the
+sailor be domesticated?" "My page about Consistency would be better
+written, 'Damn Consistency.'" But try to fancy Emerson swearing like
+the men on the street! Once only he swore a sacred oath, and that he
+himself records: it was called out by the famous, and infamous,
+Fugitive Slave Law which made every Northern man hound and huntsman
+for the Southern slave-driver. "This filthy enactment," he says, "was
+made in the Nineteenth Century by men who could read and write. I will
+not obey it, by God!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Evidently the best thing the laboring people had to offer Emerson was
+their racy and characteristic speech. When one of his former neighbors
+said of an eclipse of the sun that it looked as if a "nigger" was
+poking his head into the sun, Emerson recorded it in his Journal. His
+son reports that Emerson enjoyed the talk of the stable-men and used
+to tell their anecdotes and boasts of their horses when he came home;
+for example, "In the stable you'd take him for a slouch, but lead him
+to the door, and when he lifts up his eyes, and looks abroad,&mdash;by
+thunder! you'd think the sky was all horse." Such surprises and
+exaggerations always attracted him, unless they took a turn that made
+him laugh. He loved wit with the laugh taken out of it. The genial
+smile and not uproarious laughter suited his mood best.</p>
+
+<p>He was a lover of quiet, twinkling humor. Such humor gleams out often
+in his Journal. It gleams in this passage about Dr. Ripley: "Dr.
+Ripley prays for rain with great explicitness on Sunday, and on Monday
+the showers fell. When I spoke of the speed with which his prayers
+were answered, the good man looked modest." There is another
+prayer-for-rain story that he enjoys telling: "Dr. Allyne, of Duxbury,
+prayed for rain, at church. In the afternoon the boys carried
+umbrellas. 'Why?' 'Because you prayed for rain.' 'Pooh! boys! we
+always pray for rain: it's customary.'"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At West Point he asked a lieutenant if they had morning prayers at
+college. "We have <i>reveill&eacute;</i> beat, which is the same thing."</p>
+
+<p>He tells with relish the story of a German who went to hire a horse
+and chaise at a stable in Cambridge. "Shall I put in a buffalo?"
+inquired the livery-man. "My God! no," cried the astonished German,
+"put in a horse."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson, I am sure, takes pleasure in relating a characteristic story
+of Dr. Ripley and a thunder-shower: "One August afternoon, when I was
+in the hayfield helping him with his man to rake up his hay, I well
+remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky when the
+thunder gust was coming up to spoil the hay. He raked very fast, then
+looked at the clouds and said, 'We are in the Lord's hands, mind your
+rake, George! we are in the Lord's hands,' and seemed to say, 'You
+know me, the field is mine&mdash;Dr. Ripley's&mdash;thine own servant.'"</p>
+
+<p>The stories Emerson delighted in were all rich in this quiet humor. I
+heard of one he used to tell about a man who, when he went to his club
+at night, often lingered too long over his cups, and came home
+befuddled in the small hours, and was frequently hauled over the coals
+by his wife. One night he again came home late, and was greeted with
+the usual upbraiding in the morning. "It was not late," he said, "it
+was only one o'clock."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> "It was much later than that," said the wife.
+"It was one o'clock," repeated the man; "I heard it strike one three
+or four times!"</p>
+
+<p>Another good Emersonian story, though I do not know that he ever heard
+it, is that of an old woman who had a farm in Indiana near the
+Michigan line. The line was resurveyed, and the authorities set her
+farm in Michigan. The old lady protested&mdash;she said it was all she
+could do to stand the winters of Indiana, she could never stand those
+of Michigan!</p>
+
+<p>Cannot one see a twinkle in Emerson's eye when he quotes his wife as
+saying that "it is wicked to go to church on Sunday"? Emerson's son
+records that his father hated to be made to laugh, as he could not
+command his face well. Hence he evidently notes with approval another
+remark of his wife's: "A human being should beware how he laughs, for
+then he shows all his faults." What he thought of the loud, surprising
+laugh with which Carlyle often ended his bitter sentences, I do not
+know that he records. Its meaning to Carlyle was evidently, "Oh! what
+does it all matter?" If Emerson himself did not smile when he wrote
+the sentence about "a maiden so pure that she exchanged glances only
+with the stars," his reader, I am sure, will.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson evidently enjoyed such a story as this which was told him by a
+bishop: There was a dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>pute in a vestry at Providence between two hot
+church-members. One said at last, "I should like to know who you
+are"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Who I am?" cried the other,&mdash;"who I am! I am a humble Christian, you
+damned old heathen, you!"</p>
+
+<p>The minister whom he heard say that "nobody enjoyed religion less than
+ministers, as none enjoyed food so little as cooks," must have
+provoked the broadest kind of a smile.</p>
+
+<p>Although one of Emerson's central themes in his Journals was his
+thought about God, or his feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded
+in formulating his ideas on the subject and could not say what God is
+or is not. At the age of twenty-one he wrote in his Journal, "I know
+that I <i>know</i> next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very promising
+frame of mind for a young man. "It is not certain that God exists, but
+that He does not is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera."</p>
+
+<p>A little later he wrote: "The government of God is not a plan&mdash;that
+would be Destiny, [or we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore."</p>
+
+<p>He quotes this from Plotinus: "Of the Unity of God, nothing can be
+predicated, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it is above all
+these."</p>
+
+<p>It was a bold saying of his that "God builds his temple in the heart
+on the ruins of churches and religion."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A great deal of God in the universe," he says, "but not available to
+us until we can make it up into a man."</p>
+
+<p>But if asked, what makes it up into a man? why does it take this form?
+he would have been hard put to it for an answer.</p>
+
+<p>Persons who assume to know all about God, as if He lived just around
+the corner, as Matthew Arnold said, will not find much comfort in
+Emerson's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate expression
+concerning Him. How can we put the All, the Eternal, in words? How can
+we define the Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds are cast
+in the mould of the finite; our language is fashioned from our
+dealings with a world of boundaries and limitations and concrete
+objects and forces. How much can it serve us in dealing with a world
+of opposite kind&mdash;with the Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent,
+and Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines in a bottomless
+sea? How are we to apply our conceptions of personality to the
+all-life, to that which transcends all limitations, to that which is
+everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a local habitation and a
+name to the universal energy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or
+candle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence of the Infinite
+Light. We can deal with the solid bodies on the surface of the earth,
+but the earth as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms of
+over and under, up and down, east and west, and the like, fail us. You
+may go westward around the world and return to your own door coming
+from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradiction, the sphere a
+surface without boundaries, a mass without weight. When we ascribe
+weight to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of bodies on
+its surface&mdash;the pull of the earth is the measure of their weight; but
+the earth itself&mdash;what pulls that? Only some larger body can pull
+that, and the adjustment of the system is such that the centripetal
+and centrifugal forces balance each other, and the globes float as
+lightly as any feather.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson said he denied personality to God because it is too little,
+not too much. If you ascribe personality to God, it is perfectly fair
+to pester you with questions about Him. Where is He? How long has He
+been there? What does He do? Personality without place, or form, or
+substance, or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are the
+victims of words. We get a name for a thing and then invent the thing
+that fits it. All our names for the human faculties, as the will, the
+reason, the understanding, the imagination, conscience, instincts, and
+so on, are arbitrary divisions of a whole, to suit our own
+convenience, like the days of the week, or the seasons of the year.
+Out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> of unity we make diversity for purposes of our practical needs.
+Thought tends to the one, action to the many. We must have small
+change for everything in the universe, because our lives are made up
+of small things. We must break wholes up into fractions, and then seek
+their common multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We deal with
+God by limiting Him and breaking Him up into his attributes, or by
+conceiving Him under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less
+baffling to us. We can handle Him the better. We make a huge man of
+Him and then try to dodge the consequences of our own limitations.</p>
+
+<p>All these baffling questions pressed hard upon Emerson. He could not
+do without God in nature, and yet, like most of us, he could not
+justify himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part of nature.
+God is the All, but the All is a hard mass to digest. It means hell as
+well as heaven, demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology,
+devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well as earth
+tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer breezes, the jungle as well
+as the household, pain as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How
+are you to reconcile all these contradictions?</p>
+
+<p>Emerson said that nature was a swamp with flowers and birds on the
+borders, and terrible things in the interior. Shall we have one God
+for the fair things, and another God for the terrible things?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Nature is saturated with deity," he says, the terrific things as the
+beatific, I suppose. "A great deal of God in the universe," he again
+says, "but not valuable to us till we can make it up into a man." And
+when we make it up into a man we have got a true compendium of nature;
+all the terrific and unholy elements&mdash;fangs and poisons and eruptions,
+sharks and serpents&mdash;have each and all contributed something to the
+make-up. Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse.</p>
+
+<p>But the majority of mankind who take any interest in the God-question
+at all will probably always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and
+endow Him with personality.</p>
+
+<p>One feels like combating some of Emerson's conclusions, or, at least,
+like discounting them. His refusal to see any value in natural science
+as such, I think, shows his limitations. "Natural history," he says,
+"by itself has no value; it is like a single sex; but marry it to
+human history and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linn&aelig;us', and
+Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry." Of course he speaks
+for himself. Natural facts, scientific truth, as such, had no interest
+to him. One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to seed.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I say that the use of Natural Science seems merely 'ancillary'
+to Morals? I would learn the law of the defraction of a ray because<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth
+in ethics." Is the ethical and poetic value of the natural sciences,
+then, their main or only value to the lay mind? Their technical
+details, their tables and formul&aelig; and measurements, we may pass by,
+but the natural truths they disclose are of interest to the healthy
+mind for their own sake. It is not the ethics of chemical reactions
+and combinations&mdash;if there be ethics in them&mdash;that arrests our
+attention, but the light they throw on the problem of how the world
+was made, and how our own lives go on. The method of Nature in the
+physical world no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in the
+non-physical, or supersensuous world. But apart from that, it is
+incredible that a mind like Emerson's took no interest in natural
+knowledge for its own sake. The fact that two visible and inodorous
+gases like hydrogen and oxygen&mdash;one combustible and the other the
+supporter of combustion&mdash;when chemically combined produce water, which
+extinguishes fire, is intensely interesting as affording us a glimpse
+of the contradictions and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature's
+methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in it, let him have it
+who can extract it. The great facts of nature, such as the sphericity
+of the cosmic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual
+interdependence, the unprovable ether in which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> they float, the blue
+dome of the sky, the master currents of the ocean, the primary and the
+secondary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how they in any way
+illustrate the moral law is hard to see. The ethics, or right and
+wrong, of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no
+validity outside the human sphere. Might is right in Nature, or,
+rather, we are outside the standards of right and wrong in her sphere.
+Scientific knowledge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do not
+go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for rules for the conduct
+of life. We go to these things mainly for the satisfaction which the
+knowledge of Nature's ways gives us.</p>
+
+<p>So with natural history. For my own part I find the life-histories of
+the wild creatures about me, their ways of getting on in the world,
+their joys, their fears, their successes, their failures, their
+instincts, their intelligence, intensely interesting without any
+ulterior considerations. I am not looking for ethical or poetic
+values. I am looking for natural truths. I am less interested in the
+sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The
+significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does
+not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar
+weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for the winter than I am in
+this lesson. I had rather see a worm cast its skin than see a king
+crowned.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> I had rather see
+Ph&oelig;be building her mud nest than the
+preacher writing his sermon. I had rather see the big moth emerge from
+her cocoon&mdash;fresh and untouched as a coin that moment from the
+die&mdash;than the most fashionable "coming out" that society ever knew.
+The first song sparrow or bluebird or robin in spring, or the first
+hepatica or arbutus or violet, or the first clover or pond-lily in
+summer&mdash;must we demand some mystic password of them? Must we not love
+them for their own sake, ere they will seem worthy of our love?</p>
+
+<p>To convert natural facts into metaphysical values, or into moral or
+poetic values&mdash;in short, to make literature out of science&mdash;is a high
+achievement, and is worthy of Emerson at his best, but to claim that
+this is their sole or main use is to push idealism to the extreme. The
+poet, the artist, the nature writer not only mixes his colors with his
+brains, he mixes them with his heart's blood. Hence his pictures
+attract us without doing violence to nature.</p>
+
+<p>We will not deny Emerson his right to make poetry out of nature; we
+bless him for the inspiration he has drawn from this source, for his
+"Wood-notes," his "Humble-Bee," his "Titmouse," his "May-Day," his
+"Sea-Shore," his "Snow-Storm," and many other poems. But we must
+"quarrel" with him a little, to use one of his fa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>vorite words, for
+seeming to undervalue the facts of natural science, as such, and to
+belittle the works of the natural historian because he does not give
+us poetry and lessons in morals instead of botany and geology and
+ornithology, pure and simple. "Everything," he says, "should be
+treated poetically&mdash;law, politics, housekeeping, money. A judge and a
+banker must drive their craft poetically, as well as a dancer or a
+scribe. That is, they must exert that higher vision which causes the
+object to become fluid and plastic." "If you would write a code, or
+logarithms, or a cook-book, you cannot spare the poetic impulse." "No
+one will doubt that battles can be fought poetically who reads
+Plutarch or Las Casas."</p>
+
+<p>We are interested in the wild life around us because the lives of the
+wild creatures in a measure parallel our own; because they are the
+partakers of the same bounty of nature that we are; they are fruit of
+the same biological tree. We are interested in knowing how they get on
+in the world. Bird and bee, fish and man, are all made of one stuff,
+are all akin. The evolutionary impulse that brought man, brought his
+dog and horse. Did Emerson, indeed, only go to nature as he went to
+the bank, to make a draft upon it? Was his walk barren that brought
+him no image, no new idea? Was the day wasted that did not add a new
+line to his verse? He appears to have gone up and down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> the land
+seeking images. He was so firmly persuaded that there is not a passage
+in the human soul, perhaps not a shade of thought, but has its emblem
+in nature, that he was ever on the alert to discover these relations
+of his own mind to the external world. "I see the law of Nature
+equally exemplified in bar-room and in a saloon of the philosopher. I
+get instruction and the opportunities of my genius indifferently in
+all places, companies, and pursuits, so only there be antagonisms."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson thought that science as such bereaved Nature of her charm. To
+the man of little or no imagination or sensibility to beauty, Nature
+has no charm anyhow, but if he have these gifts, they will certainly
+survive scientific knowledge, and be quickened and heightened by it.</p>
+
+<p>After we have learned all that the astronomers can tell us about the
+midnight heavens, do we look up at the stars with less wonder and awe?
+After we have learned all that the chemist and the physicist can tell
+us about matter&mdash;its interior activities and its exterior laws and
+relations&mdash;do we admire and marvel less? After the geologist has told
+us all he has found out about the earth's crust and the rocks, when we
+quarry our building-stone, do we plough and hoe and plant its soil
+with less interest and veneration? No, science as the pursuit of truth
+causes light to spring out of the abysmal darkness, and enhances our
+love and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> interest in Nature. Is the return of the seasons less
+welcome because we know the cause? Is an eclipse less startling
+because it occurs exactly on time? Science bereaves Nature of her
+dread and fearsomeness, it breaks the spell which the ignorance and
+credulity of men have cast upon her.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson had little use for science except so far as it yielded him
+symbols and parables for his superscience. The electric spark did not
+kindle his interest unless it held an ethical fact for him; chemical
+reactions were dull affairs unless he could trace their laws in mental
+reactions. "Read chemistry a little," he said, "and you will quickly
+see that its laws and experiments will furnish an alphabet or
+vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in
+composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same
+substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical
+combination, and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the noblest
+chemistry that can extract sunshine from cucumbers, but that which can
+extract "honor from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from beggars,
+justice from thieves, benevolence from misers."</p>
+
+<p>Though mindful of the birds and flowers and trees and rivers in his
+walks, it was mainly through his pressing need of figures and symbols
+for transcendental use. He says, "Whenever you enumer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>ate a physical
+law, I hear in it a moral law." His final interest was in the moral
+law. Unless the scientific fact you brought him had some moral value,
+it made little impression upon him.</p>
+
+<p>He admits he is more interested to know "why the star form is so oft
+repeated in botany, and why the number five is such a favorite with
+Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the
+formation of buds." His insight into Nature, and the prophetic
+character of his genius, are seen in many ways, among others in his
+anticipation or poetic forecast of the Darwinian theory of the origin
+of species, in 1853.</p>
+
+<p>"We want a higher logic to put us in training for the laws of
+creation. How does the step forward from one species to a higher
+species of an existing genus take place? The ass is not the parent of
+the horse; no fish begets a bird. But the concurrence of new
+conditions necessitates a new object in which these conditions meet
+and flower. When the hour is struck in onward nature, announcing that
+all is ready for the birth of higher form and nobler function, not one
+pair of parents, but the whole consenting system thrills, yearns, and
+produces. It is a favorable aspect of planets and of elements."</p>
+
+<p>In 1840 he wrote, "The method of advance in Nature is perpetual
+transformation." In the same year he wrote:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There is no leap&mdash;not a shock of violence throughout nature. Man
+therefore must be predicted in the first chemical relation exhibited
+by the first atom. If we had eyes to see it, this bit of quartz would
+certify us of the necessity that man must exist as inevitably as the
+cities he has actually built."</p>
+
+<h3>X</h3>
+<p>How fruitful in striking and original men New England was in those
+days&mdash;poets, orators, picturesque characters! In Concord, Emerson,
+Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott; in Boston and Cambridge, Lowell,
+Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, Father Taylor, Bancroft,
+Everett, and others, with Webster standing out like a Colossus on the
+New Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems to have been the
+aftermath of the Revolution. Will our social and industrial revolution
+bring anything like another such a crop? Will the great World War
+produce another? Until now too much prosperity, too much mammon, too
+much "at ease in Zion" has certainly prevailed for another band of
+great idealists to appear.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. He was fairly
+hypnotized by the majesty and power of his mind and personality, and
+he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of
+primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man
+as Everett was of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks.
+Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, "with those
+devouring eyes, with that portraying hand," had seen Webster. And this
+is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or
+Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight
+against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous,
+crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows,
+like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be <i>blown</i>; the
+mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:&mdash;I have not traced as much of
+<i>silent Berserkir-rage</i>, that I remember of, in any other man."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson's description and praise and criticism of Webster form some of
+the most notable pages in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to
+Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried there, the fact so
+excited Emerson that he could not sleep. It was like the perturbation
+of a planet in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Emerson
+seems to have spent much time at the court-house to hear and study
+him: "Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get
+settled down to writing until he has well gone from the county. He is
+a natural Emperor of men." He adjourned the court every day in true
+imperial fashion, simply by rising and taking his hat and looking the
+Judge coolly in the face, whereupon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> the Judge "bade the Crier adjourn
+the Court." But when Emerson finally came to look upon him with the
+same feeling with which he saw one of those strong Paddies of the
+railroad, he lost his interest in the trial and did not return to the
+court in the afternoon. "The green fields on my way home were too
+fresh and fair, and forbade me to go again."</p>
+
+<p>It was with profound grief that he witnessed the decline of Webster's
+political career, owing to his truckling to the Southern proslavery
+element, and to his increasing intemperance. To see the placid,
+transcendental Emerson "fighting mad," flaring up in holy wrath, read
+his criticisms of Webster, after Webster's defection&mdash;his moral
+collapse to win the South and his support of the Fugitive Slave Law.
+This got into Emerson's blood and made him think "daggers and
+tomahawks." He has this to say of a chance meeting with Webster in
+Boston, at this period: "I saw Webster on the street&mdash;but he was
+changed since I saw him last&mdash;black as a thunder-cloud, and
+careworn.... I did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw
+me and would not meet my face."</p>
+
+<p>In 1851 he said that some of Webster's late speeches and state papers
+were like "Hail Columbia" when sung at a slave-auction; then he
+follows with the terrible remark: "The word <i>liberty</i> in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> the mouth of
+Mr. Webster sounds like the word <i>love</i> in the mouth of a courtezan."</p>
+
+<p>The prizes or fancied prizes of politics seem to have corrupted all
+the great men of that day&mdash;Webster, Choate, Foote, Clay, Everett.
+Their "disgusting obsequiousness" to the South fired Emerson's wrath.</p>
+
+<h3>XI</h3>
+<p>The orthodox brethren of his time, and probably of our time also, I
+fancy, could make very little of Emerson's religion. It was the
+religion of the spirit and not of the utilitarian and matter-of-fact
+understanding. It identified man with God and made all nature
+symbolical of the spirit. He was never tired of repeating that all
+true prayers answered themselves&mdash;the spirit which the act of prayer
+begets in one's self is the answer. Your prayer for humility, for
+charity, for courage, begets these emotions in the mind. The devout
+asking comes from a perception of their value. Hence the only real
+prayers are for spiritual good. We converse with spiritual and
+invisible things only through the medium of our own hearts. The
+preliminary attitude of mind that moves us to face in this direction
+is the blessing. The soldier who, on the eve of battle, prays for
+courage, has already got what he asks for. Prayer for visible,
+material good is infidelity to the moral law. God is within you, more
+your better self than you are. Many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> prayers are a rattling of empty
+husks. Emerson says the wise man in the storm prays God, not for
+safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.</p>
+
+<p>Although Emerson broke away from all religious forms, yet was there
+something back of them that he always respected, as do we all. He
+relates that one night at a hotel a stranger intruded into his chamber
+after midnight, claiming a share in it. "But after his lamp had smoked
+the chamber full, and I had turned round to the wall in despair, the
+man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside, and made in low
+whispers a long earnest prayer. Then was the relation entirely changed
+between us. I fretted no more, but respected and liked him."</p>
+
+<p>Contrasting his own case with that of so many young men who owed their
+religious training exclusively to Cambridge and other public
+institutions, he says: "How much happier was my star which rained on
+me influence of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious
+sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and
+derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly
+lives and godly deeds of sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was
+itself a culture, an education."</p>
+
+<h3>XII</h3>
+<p>A course of ten lectures which he delivered in Boston in February,
+1840, on the "Present Age" gave him little pleasure. He could not warm
+up,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> get agitated, and so warm and agitate others: "A cold mechanical
+preparation for a delivery as decorous,&mdash;fine things, pretty things,
+wise things,&mdash;but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no
+transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment." Because he lacked
+constitutional vigor, he could expend only, say, twenty-one hours on
+each lecture, if he would be able and ready for the next. If he could
+only rally the lights and mights of sixty hours into twenty, he said,
+he should hate himself less. Self-criticism was a notable trait with
+him. Of self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and enemies
+rarely said severer things of him than he said of himself. He was
+almost morbidly conscious of his own defects, both as a man and as a
+writer. There are many pages of self-criticism in the Journals, but
+not one of self-praise. In 1842 he writes: "I have not yet adjusted my
+relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too
+young, or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?"
+Later he sighs, "If only I could be set aglow!" He had wished for a
+professorship, or for a pulpit, much as he reacted from the
+church&mdash;something to give him the stimulus of a stated task. Some
+friend recommended an Abolition campaign to him: "I doubt not a course
+in mobs would do me good."</p>
+
+<p>Then he refers to his faults as a writer: "I think I have material
+enough to serve my country<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>men with thought and music, if only it was
+not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson felt his own bardic character, but lamented that he had so few
+of the bardic gifts. At the age of fifty-nine he says: "I am a bard
+least of bards. I cannot, like them, make lofty arguments in stately,
+continuous verse, constraining the rocks, trees, animals, and the
+periodic stars to say my thoughts,&mdash;for that is the gift of great
+poets; but I am a bard because I stand near them, and apprehend all
+they utter, and with pure joy hear that which I also would say, and,
+moreover, I speak interruptedly words and half stanzas which have the
+like scope and aim:"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What I cannot declare, yet cannot all withhold."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is certainly no over-valuation in this sentence, made when he
+was sixty-two: "In the acceptance that my papers find among my
+thoughtful countrymen, in these days, I cannot help seeing how limited
+is their reading. If they read only the books that I do, they would
+not exaggerate so wildly." Two years before that he had said, "I often
+think I could write a criticism of Emerson that would hit the white."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson was a narrow-chested, steeple-shouldered man with a tendency
+to pulmonary disease, against which he made a vigorous fight all his
+days.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> He laments his feeble physical equipment in his poem,
+"Terminus":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bad husbands of their fires,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who, when they gave thee breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Failed to bequeath<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The needful sinew stark as once,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Baresark marrow to thy bones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But left a legacy of ebbing veins,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Amid the gladiators, halt and numb."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And yet, looking back near the end of his life, he says that
+considering all facts and conditions he thinks he has had triumphant
+health.</p>
+
+<h3>XIII</h3>
+<p>Emerson's wisdom and catholicity of spirit always show in his
+treatment of the larger concerns of life and conduct. How remarkable
+is this passage written in Puritanic New England in 1842:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst of rich,
+decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well-nigh persuaded
+to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her friends, who are also
+my friends, lamented to me the growth of this inclination.
+But I told them that I think she is to be greatly
+congratulated on the event. She has lived in great poverty
+of events. In form and years a woman, she is still a child,
+having had no experiences, and although of a fine, liberal,
+susceptible, expanding nature, has never yet found any
+worthy object of attention; has not been in love, nor been
+called out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly
+wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she shall
+find what she needs, in a power to call out the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span> slumbering
+religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that the guide who
+has led her into this path is a young girl of a lively,
+forcible, but quite external character, who teaches her the
+historical argument for the Catholic faith. I told A. that I
+hoped she would not be misled by attaching any importance to
+that. If the offices of the church attracted her, if its
+beautiful forms and humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine
+and St. Bernard, Jesus and Madonna, cathedral music and
+masses, then go, for thy dear heart's sake, but do not go
+out of this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an
+icehouse again of external. At all events, I charged her to
+pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange
+thoroughly.</p></div>
+
+<p>And this on the Church and the common people written the year before:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Church a&euml;rates my good neighbors and serves them as a
+somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a clean shirt or a
+bath or a shampooing. The minister is a functionary and the
+meeting-house a functionary; they are one and, when they
+have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the
+Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in
+social and public and ideal relations beyond
+neighborhood,&mdash;higher than the town-meeting&mdash;to their fellow
+men. They marry, and the minister who represents this high
+public, celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and
+again they are published by his intervention. One of their
+family dies, he comes again, and the family go up publicly
+to the church to be publicised or churched in this official
+sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as it goes. It is
+homage to the Ideal Church, which they have not: which the
+actual Church so foully misrepresents. But it is better so
+than nohow. These people have no fine arts, no literature,
+no great men to boswellize, no fine speculation to entertain
+their family board<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> or their solitary toil with. Their talk
+is of oxen and pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever
+liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever
+spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the Church
+is their fact for such things. It has not been discredited
+in their eyes as books, lectures, or living men of genius
+have been. It is still to them the accredited symbol of the
+religious Idea. The Church is not to be defended against any
+spiritualist clamoring for its reform, but against such as
+say it is expedient to shut it up and have none, this much
+may be said. It stands in the history of the present time as
+a high school for the civility and mansuetude of the people.
+(I might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the
+medium of those superior ablutions described above, only
+that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Lyceum, as yet
+an open and uncommitted organ, free to admit the
+ministrations of any inspired man that shall pass by: whilst
+the other churches are committed and will exclude him.)</p>
+
+<p>I should add that, although this is the real account to be
+given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet
+it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that
+it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the
+woods of New Hampshire to Boston and serves his
+apprenticeship in a shop, and now opens his own store, to
+hang up his name in bright gold letters a foot long? His
+father could not write his name: it is only lately that he
+could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun shines on
+it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact
+in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make
+it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his
+son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state:
+a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this
+name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he
+is at least made responsible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> and thoughtful by his public
+relation of a seen and a&euml;rated name.</p>
+
+<p>Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life
+which he meets with; how to do with few and easily gotten
+things: but let him seize with enthusiasm the opportunity of
+doing what he can, for the virtues are natural to each man
+and the talents are little perfections.</p>
+
+<p>Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is so young and untaught as time.</p></div>
+
+<p>How wise is his saying that we do not turn to the books of the
+Bible&mdash;St. Paul and St. John&mdash;to start us on our task, as we do to
+Marcus Aurelius, or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or
+Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes"! "It comes with a
+certain official claim against which the mind revolts. The Bible has
+its own nobilities&mdash;might well be charming if left simply on its
+merits, as other books are, but this, 'You must,' 'It is your duty,'
+in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the introduction of martial
+law into Concord. If you should dot our farms with picket lines, and I
+could not go or come across lots without a pass, I should resist, or
+else emigrate. If Concord were as beautiful as Paradise, it would be
+as detestable to me."</p>
+
+<p>In his essays and letters Emerson gives one the impression of never
+using the first words that come to mind, nor the second, but the third
+or fourth; always a sense of selection, of deliberate choice. To use
+words in a novel way, and impart<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> a little thrill of surprise, seemed
+to be his aim. This effort of selection often mars his page. He is
+rarely carried away by his thought, but he snares or captures it with
+a word. He does not feel first and think second; he thinks first, and
+the feeling does not always follow. He dearly loved writing; it was
+the joy of his life, but it was a conscious intellectual effort. It
+was often a kind of walking on stilts; his feet are not on the common
+ground. And yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;what a power he was, and how precious his
+contributions!</p>
+
+<p>He says in his Journal, "I have observed long since that to give the
+thought a full and just expression I must not prematurely utter it."
+This hesitation, this studied selection robs him of the grace of
+felicity and spontaneity. The compensation is often a sense of novelty
+and a thrill of surprise. Moreover, he avoids the commonplace and the
+cheap and tedious. His product is always a choice one, and is seen to
+have a quality of its own. No page has more individuality than his,
+and none is so little like the page of the ordinary professional
+writer.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis a false note to speak of Emerson's doctrines, as Henry James did.
+He had no doctrines. He had leading ideas, but he had no system, no
+argument. It was his attitude of mind and spirit that was significant
+and original. He would have nothing to do with stereotyped opinions.
+What<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> he said to-day might contradict what he said yesterday, or what
+he might say to-morrow. No matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a
+sphere that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any other writer
+stood for the contradictory character of spiritual truth. Truth is
+what we make it&mdash;what takes the imprint of one's mind; it is not a
+definite something like gold or silver, it is any statement that fits
+our mental make-up, that comes home to us. What comes home in one mood
+may not come home in another.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas about God. Personality
+and impersonality might both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what
+may not be affirmed of it in our own minds?</p>
+
+<p>The good of such a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his
+spirit, his heroic attitude, his consonance with the universal mind.
+His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the
+hard facts of life and experience.</p>
+
+<h3>XIV</h3>
+<p>Emerson records in his Journal: "I have been writing and speaking what
+were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have
+not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that
+it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from
+any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span> I delight in
+driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?&mdash;they would
+interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school
+follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if
+it did not create independence."</p>
+
+<p>It is never easy to stray far from the master in high moral, &aelig;sthetic,
+and literary matters and be on the safe side; we are only to try to
+escape his individual bias, to break over his limitations and "brave
+the landscape's look" with our own eyes. We are to be more on guard
+against his affinities, his unconscious attractions and repulsions,
+than against his ethical and intellectual conclusions, if one may make
+that distinction, which I know is hazardous business. We readily
+impose our own limitations upon others and see the world as old when
+we are old.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson criticized Carlyle because Carlyle was not Emerson, just as
+Carlyle criticized Emerson because he was not Carlyle. We are all poor
+beggars in this respect; each of us is the victim of his own demon.
+Beware of the predilection of the master! When his temperament impels
+him he is no longer a free man.</p>
+
+<p>We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to see anything in
+Hawthorne's work; they had "no inside to them"; "it would take him and
+Alcott together to make a man"; and, again, in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span> rather
+contemptuous disposal of Poe as "the jingle man" and his verdict upon
+Shelley as "never a poet"! The intellectual content of Shelley's work
+is not great; but that he was not a poet, in fact that he was anything
+else but a poet, though not of the highest order, is contrary to the
+truth, I think. Limitations like this are not infrequent in Emerson.
+Yet Emerson was a great critic of men and of books. A highly
+interesting volume showing him in this character could be compiled
+from the Journals.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson and Hawthorne were near neighbors for several years. Emerson
+liked the man better than his books. They once had a good long walk
+together; they walked to Harvard village and back, occupying a couple
+of days and walking about twenty miles a day. They had much
+conversation&mdash;talked of Scott and Landor and others. They found the
+bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull places. The Temperance Society had
+emptied them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one of them, but
+"was soon out on the piazza." Hawthorne, Emerson said, was more
+inclined to play Jove than Mercury. It is a pleasing picture&mdash;these
+two men, so unlike, but both typical of New England and both men of a
+high order of genius, walking in friendly converse along the country
+roads in the golden September days over seventy years ago. Emerson
+always regretted that he never succeeded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> in "conquering a friendship"
+with Hawthorne, mainly because they had so few traits in common. To
+the satisfaction of silent intercourse with men Emerson was clearly a
+stranger. There must be an interchange of ideas; the feeling of
+comradeship, the communion of congenial souls was not enough.
+Hawthorne, shy, silent, rather gloomy, yet there must have been a
+charm about his mere presence that more than made up for his want of
+conversation. His silence was golden. Emerson was a transcendental
+Yankee and was always bent on driving sharp bargains in the
+interchange of ideas with the persons he met. He did not propose to
+swap horses or watches or jack-knives, but he would swap ideas with
+you day in and day out. If you had no ideas to swap, he lost interest
+in you.</p>
+
+<p>The wisdom of a great creative artist like Hawthorne does not
+necessarily harden into bright epigrammatic sayings or rules for the
+conduct of life, and the available intellectual content of his works
+to the Emersonian type of mind may be small; but his interior, his
+emotional and imaginative richness may much more than make it up. The
+scholar, the sayer of things, must always rank below the creator, or
+the maker of things.</p>
+
+<p>Philosophers contradict themselves like other mortals. Here and there
+in his Journals Emerson rails against good nature, and says "tomahawks
+are better." "Why should they call me good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>-natured? I, too, like
+puss, have a tractile claw." And he declares that he likes the sayers
+of No better than the sayers of Yes, and that he preferred hard
+clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners. In another mood, or from
+another point of view, he says of a man, "Let him go into his closet
+and pray the Divinity to make him so great as to be good-natured." And
+again, "How great it is to do a little, as, for instance, to deserve
+the praise of good nature, or of humility, or of punctuality."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson's characterization of himself as always a painter is
+interesting. People, he said, came to his lectures with expectation
+that he was to realize the Republic he described, and they ceased to
+come when they found this reality no nearer: "They mistook me. I am
+and always was a painter. I paint still with might and main and choose
+the best subject I can. Many have I seen come and go with false hopes
+and fears, and dubiously affected by my pictures. But I paint on." "I
+portray the ideal, not the real," he might have added. He was a
+poet-seer and not a historian. He was a painter of ideas, as Carlyle
+was a painter of men and events. Always is there an effort at vivid
+and artistic expression. If his statement does not kindle the
+imagination, it falls short of his aim. He visualizes his most subtle
+and abstract conceptions&mdash;sees the idea wedded to its correlative in
+the actual world. A new figure, a fresh simile<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> gave him a thrill of
+pleasure. He went hawking up and down the fields of science, of trade,
+of agriculture, of nature, seeking them. He thinks in symbols, he
+paints his visions of the ideal with pigments drawn from the world all
+about him. To call such men as Emerson and Carlyle painters is only to
+emphasize their artistic temperaments. Their seriousness, their
+devotion to high moral and intellectual standards, only lift them, as
+they do Whitman, out of the world of mere decorative art up to the
+world of heroic and creative art where art as such does not obtrude
+itself.</p>
+
+<h3>XV</h3>
+<p>Emerson wonders why it is that man eating does not attract the
+imagination or attract the artist: "Why is our diet and table not
+agreeable to the imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without
+shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the browsing ox, the lion
+leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man
+eating. The difference seems to consist in the presence or absence of
+the world at the feast. The diet is base, be it what it may, that is
+hidden in caves or cellars or houses.... Did you ever eat your bread
+on the top of a mountain, or drink water there? Did you ever camp out
+with lumbermen or travellers in the prairie? Did you ever eat the
+poorest rye or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilder<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>ness? and
+did you not find that the mixture of sun and sky with your bread gave
+it a certain mundane savour and comeliness?"</p>
+
+<p>I do not think Emerson hits on the true explanation of why man feeding
+is not an attractive subject for the painter. It is not that the diet
+is base and is hidden in caves and cellars, or that the world is not
+present at the feast. It is because eating is a purely selfish animal
+occupation; there is no touch of the noble or the idyllic or the
+heroic in it. In the act man confesses his animal nature; he is no
+longer an Emerson, a Dante, a Plato&mdash;he is simply a physiological
+contrivance taking in nutriment. The highest and the lowest are for
+the moment on the same level. The lady and her maid, the lord and his
+lackey are all one. Eating your bread on a mountain-top or in the camp
+of lumbermen or with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness adds a new
+element. Here the picture has all nature for a background and the
+imagination is moved. The rye and the oatcake now become a kind of
+heavenly manna, or, as Fitzgerald has it, under such conditions the
+wilderness is Paradise enow. The simple act of feeding does not now
+engross the attention. Associate with the act of eating any worthy or
+noble idea, and it is at once lifted to a higher level. A mother
+feeding her child, a cook passing food to the tramp at the door or to
+other hungry and forlorn wayfarers, or soldiers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span> pausing to eat their
+rations in the field, or fishermen beside the stream, or the haymakers
+with their lunch under a tree&mdash;in all such incidents there are
+pictorial elements because the least part of it all to the looker-on
+is the act of eating.</p>
+
+<p>In Da Vinci's "Last Supper" the mere animal act of taking food plays
+no part; the mind is occupied with higher and more significant things.
+A suggestion of wine or of fruit in a painting may be agreeable, but
+from a suggestion of the kitchen and the cook we turn away. The
+incident of some of Washington's officers during the Revolution
+entertaining some British officers (an historical fact) on baked
+potatoes and salt would appeal to the artistic imagination. All the
+planting and reaping of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants,
+as is so much of our whole industrial activity; but art looks kindly
+upon much of it, shows us more or less in partnership with primal
+energies. People surrounding a table after all signs of the dinner
+have been removed hold the elements of an agreeable picture, because
+that suggests conversation and social intercourse&mdash;a feast of reason
+and a flow of soul. We are no longer animals; we have moved up many
+degrees higher in the scale of human values.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson's deep love and admiration for Carlyle come out many times in
+the Journals. No other literary man of his times moved and impressed
+him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> lasted upwards of
+forty years, is the most valuable correspondence known to me in
+English literature. It is a history of the growth and development of
+these two remarkable minds.</p>
+
+<p>I lately reread the Correspondence, mainly to bring my mind again in
+contact with these noble spirits, so much more exalted than any in our
+own time, but partly to see what new light the letters threw upon the
+lives of these two men.</p>
+
+<p>There is little of the character of intimate and friendly letters in
+these remarkable documents. It is not Dear Tom or Dear Waldo. It is
+Dear Emerson or Dear Carlyle. They are not letters, they are epistles,
+like Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, or to the Thessalonians, or to
+the Romans. Each of them contains the fragments of a gospel that both
+were preaching, each in his own way, but at bottom the same&mdash;the
+beauty and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, the moral
+law and our duty to God and man will stand. These two men, so
+different in character and temperament, were instantly drawn together
+by that magnet&mdash;the moral sentiment. Carlyle's works were occupied
+almost entirely with men&mdash;with history, biography, political events,
+and government; Emerson's with ideas, nature, and poetry; yet the bed
+rock in each was the same. Both preached an evangel, but how
+different!</p>
+
+<p>Emerson makes a note of the days on which he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span> received a letter from,
+or wrote one to, his great Scottish friend. Both were important events
+with him. It is evident that Emerson makes more of an effort to write
+his best in these letters than does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off
+with more ease and unconscious mastery. The exchange is always in
+favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, the more prodigious
+personality, and had the advantage in the richness and venerableness
+of the Old World setting. But Emerson did not hesitate to discount him
+in his letters and in his Journals, very wisely sometimes, not so
+wisely at others.</p>
+
+<p>"O Carlyle, the merit of glass is not to be seen, but to be seen
+through; but every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle glass is
+visible." Of course Carlyle might reply that stained glass has other
+merits than transparency, or he might ask: Why should an author's
+style be compared to glass anyhow, since it is impossible to
+dissociate it from the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to
+reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. There is the charm and
+witchery of style, as in Emerson's own best pages, as well as the
+worth of the subject-matter. Is it not true that in the description of
+any natural object or scene or event we want something more than to
+see it through a perfectly transparent medium? We want the added charm
+or illusion of the writer's own way of seeing it, the hue of his own
+spirit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I think we may admit all this&mdash;doubtless Emerson would admit it&mdash;and
+yet urge that Carlyle's style had many faults of the kind Emerson
+indicated. It thrusts itself too much upon the reader's attention. His
+prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most
+transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best
+is very pleasing; at its worst it becomes a wearisome mannerism. When
+a writer's style gets into a rut his reader is not happy. Ease,
+flexibility, transparency, though it be colored transparency, are
+among the merits we want.</p>
+
+<p>The most just and penetrating thing Emerson ever said about Carlyle is
+recorded in his Journal in 1847: "In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is much
+more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly
+superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits
+all the time. There is more character than intellect in every
+sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." Criticism like
+this carries the force and conviction of a scientific analysis.</p>
+
+<p>The Journals abound in similar illuminating bits of criticism directed
+to nearly all the more noted authors of English literature, past and
+present. In science we do want an absolutely colorless, transparent
+medium, but in literature the personality of the writer is everything.
+The born writer gives us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emerson's, or out of
+Arnold's, the savor of the man's inborn quality&mdash;the savor of that
+which acts over and above his will&mdash;and we have robbed them of their
+distinctive quality. Literature is always truth of some sort, plus a
+man. No one knew this better than Emerson himself. Another remark of
+Emerson's, made when he was twenty-seven years old, has high literary
+value:</p>
+
+<p>"There is no beauty in words except in their collocation."</p>
+
+<p>It is not beautiful words that make beautiful poetry, or beautiful
+prose, but ordinary words beautifully arranged. The writer who hopes
+by fine language to invoke fine ideas is asking the tailor to turn him
+out a fine man. First get your great idea, and you will find it is
+already fitly clothed. The image of the clothes in this connection is,
+of course, a very inadequate and misleading one, since language is the
+thought or its vital integument, and not merely its garment. We often
+praise a writer for his choice of words, and Emerson himself says in
+the same paragraph from which I quote the above: "No man can write
+well who thinks there is no choice of words for him." There is always
+a right word and every other than that is wrong. There is always the
+best word, or the best succession of words to give force and vividness
+to the idea. All painters use the same colors,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> all musicians use the
+same notes, all sculptors use the same marble, all architects use the
+same materials and all writers use essentially the same words, their
+arrangement and combination alone making the difference in the various
+products. Nature uses the same elements in her endless variety of
+living things; their different arrangement and combinations, and some
+interior necessity which we have to call the animating principle, is
+the secret of the individuality of each.</p>
+
+<p>Of course we think in words or images, and no man can tell which is
+first, or if there is any first in such matters&mdash;the thought or the
+word&mdash;any more than the biochemist can tell us which is first in the
+living body, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, or the living
+force that weaves itself a corporeal garment out of these elements.</p>
+
+<h3>XVI</h3>
+<p>Emerson hungered for the quintessence of things, their last
+concentrated, intensified meanings, for the pith and marrow of men and
+events, and not for their body and bulk. He wanted the ottar of roses
+and not a rose garden, the diamond and not a mountain of carbon. This
+bent gives a peculiar beauty and stimulus to his writings, while at
+the same time it makes the reader crave a little more body and
+substance. The succulent leaf and stalk of certain garden vegetables
+is better to one's lik<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>ing than the more pungent seed. If Emerson
+could only have given us the essence of Father Taylor's copious,
+eloquent, flesh-and-blood discourses, how it would have delighted us!
+or if he could only have got the silver out of Alcott's bewitching
+moonshine&mdash;that would have been worth while!</p>
+
+<p>But why wish Emerson had been some other than he was? He was at least
+the quintessence of New England Puritanism, its last and deepest
+meaning and result, lifted into the regions of ethics and &aelig;sthetics.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>FLIES IN AMBER</h3>
+<p>It has been the fashion among our younger writers to speak slightingly
+and flippantly of Emerson, referring to him as outworn, and as the
+apostle of the obvious. This view is more discreditable to the young
+people than is their criticism damaging to Emerson. It can make little
+difference to Emerson's fame, but it would be much more becoming in
+our young writers to garland his name with flowers than to utter these
+harsh verdicts.</p>
+
+<p>It is undoubtedly true that Emerson entered into and influenced the
+lives of more choice spirits, both men and women, during the past
+generation than did any other American author. Whether he still does
+so would be interesting to know. We who have felt his tonic and
+inspiring influence can but hope so. Yet how impossible he seems in
+times like these in which we live, when the stars of the highest
+heaven of the spirit which illumine his page are so obscured or
+blotted out by the dust and the fog of our hurrying, materialistic
+age! Try to think of Emerson spending a winter going about the Western
+States reading to miscellaneous audiences essays like those that now
+make up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> his later volumes. What chance would he stand, even in
+university towns, as against the "movies" (a word so ugly I hesitate
+to write it) in the next street?</p>
+
+<p>I once defended Emerson against a criticism of Matthew Arnold's. It is
+true, as Arnold says, that Emerson is not a great writer, except on
+rare occasions. Now and then, especially in his earlier essays, there
+is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution,
+growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph
+follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a
+kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the
+incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read
+as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon
+became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned
+argument. Pictures and parables and startling affirmations suited
+better. Emerson did not stoop to his audience; there was no
+condescension in him. The last time I heard him, which was in
+Washington in the early seventies, his theme was "Manners," and much
+of it passed over the heads of his audience.</p>
+
+<p>Certain of Emerson's works must strike the average reader, when he
+first looks into them, as a curious medley of sense and wild
+extravagance, utterly lacking in the logical sequence of the best<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+prose, and often verging on the futile and the absurd. Yet if one does
+not get discouraged, one will soon see running through them veins of
+the purest gold of the spirit, and insight into Nature's ways, that
+redeem and more than redeem them.</p>
+
+<p>I recall that when, as a young man, I looked into them the first time,
+I could make nothing of them. I was fresh from reading the standard
+essayists and philosophers of English literature&mdash;Addison, Steele,
+Cowley, Johnson, Locke&mdash;and the poems of Pope, Young, and Cowper, all
+of ethical import and value, and sometimes didactic, but never
+mystical and transcendental, and the plunge into Emerson was a leap
+into a strange world. But a few years later, when I opened his essays
+again, they were like spring-water to parched lips. Now, in my old
+age, I go back to him with a half-sad pleasure, as one goes back to
+the scenes of one's youth.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson taught us a mingled poetic and prophetic way of looking at
+things that stays with us. The talented English woman Anne Gilchrist
+said we had outgrown Emerson; had absorbed all he had to give us; and
+were leaving him behind. Of course he was always a teacher and
+preacher, in the thrall of his priestly inheritance, and to that
+extent we leave him behind as we do not leave behind works of pure
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>As to continuity, some of his essays have much more of it than others.
+In his "Nature" the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> theme is unfolded, there is growth and evolution;
+and his first and second series of Essays likewise show it. The essays
+on "Character," on "Self-Reliance," on the "Over-Soul," meet the
+requirements of sound prose. And if there is any sounder prose than
+can be found in his "Nature," or in his "English Traits," or in his
+historical and biographical addresses, I do not know where to find it.
+How flat and commonplace seem the works of some of the masters of
+prose to whom Arnold alludes&mdash;Cicero, Voltaire, Addison,
+Swift&mdash;compared with those of Emerson! A difference like that between
+the prismatic hues of raindrops suspended from a twig or a trellis in
+the sunlight and the water in the spring or the brook.</p>
+
+<p>But in Emerson's later work there is, as geologists say, nonconformity
+between the strata which make up his paragraphs. There is only
+juxtaposition. Among his later papers the one on "Wealth" flows along
+much more than the one on "Fate." Emerson believed in wealth. Poverty
+did not attract him. It was not suited to his cast of mind. Poverty
+was humiliating. Emerson accumulated a fortune, and it added to his
+self-respect. Thoreau's pride in his poverty must have made Emerson
+shiver.</p>
+
+<p>Although Arnold refused to see in Emerson a great writer, he did admit
+that he was eminent as the "friend and aider of those who would live
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span> the spirit"; but Arnold apparently overlooked the fact that,
+devoid of the merit of good literature, no man's writings could have
+high spiritual value. Strip the Bible of its excellence as literature,
+and you have let out its life-blood. Literature is not a varnish or a
+polish. It is not a wardrobe. It is the result of a vital, imaginative
+relation of the man to his subject. And Emerson's subject-matter at
+its best always partakes of the texture of his own mind. It is
+admitted that there are times when his writing lacks
+organization,&mdash;the vital ties,&mdash;when his rhetoric is more like a
+rocking-horse or a merry-go-round than like the real thing. But there
+are few writers who do not mark time now and then, and Emerson is no
+exception; and I contend that at his best his work has the sequence
+and evolution of all great prose. And yet, let me say that if
+Emerson's power and influence depended upon his logic, he would be
+easily disposed of. Fortunately they do not. They depend, let me
+repeat, upon his spiritual power and insight, and the minor defects I
+am pointing out are only like flies in amber.</p>
+
+<p>He thought in images more strictly than any other contemporary writer,
+and was often desperately hard-put to it to make his thought wed his
+image. He confessed that he did not know how to argue, and that he
+could only say what he saw. But he had spiritual vision; we cannot
+deny this, though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> we do deny him logical penetration. I doubt if
+there ever was a writer of such wide and lasting influence as Emerson,
+in whom the logical sense was so feeble and shadowy. He had in this
+respect a feminine instead of a masculine mind, an intuitional instead
+of a reasoning one. It made up in audacious, often extravagant,
+affirmations what it lacked in syllogistic strength. The logical mind,
+with its sense of fitness and proportion, does not strain or
+over-strain the thread that knits the parts together. It does not jump
+to conclusions, but reaches them step by step. The flesh and blood of
+feeling and sentiment may clothe the obscure framework of logic, but
+the logic is there all the same. Emerson's mind was as devoid of
+logical sense as are our remembered dreams, or as Christian Science is
+of science. He said that truth ceased to be such when polemically
+stated. Occasionally he amplifies and unfolds an idea, as in the
+essays already mentioned, but generally his argument is a rope of
+sand. Its strength is the strength of the separate particles. He is
+perpetually hooking things together that do not go together. It is
+like putting an apple on a pumpkin vine, or an acorn on a hickory. "A
+club foot and a club wit." "Why should we fear," he says, "to be
+crushed by the same elements&mdash;we who are made up of the same
+elements?" But were we void of fear, we should be crushed much oftener
+than we are. The electricity in our bodies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> does not prevent us from
+being struck by lightning, nor the fluids in our bodies prevent the
+waters from drowning us, nor the carbon in our bodies prevent carbon
+dioxide from poisoning us.</p>
+
+<p>One of Emerson's faults as a writer arose from his fierce hunger for
+analogy. "I would rather have a good symbol of my thought," he
+confesses, "than the suffrage of Kant or of Plato." "All thinking is
+analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy." His passion
+for analogy betrays him here and there in his Journals, as in this
+passage: "The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does fire
+or wind or tree. Neither does a noble natural man," and so forth. If
+water and fire and wind and tree were in the habit of talking of
+anything else, this kind of a comparison would not seem so spurious.</p>
+
+<p>A false note in rhetoric like the above you will find in Emerson
+oftener than a false note in taste. I find but one such in the
+Journals: "As soon as a man gets his suction-hose down into the great
+deep, he belongs to no age, but is an eternal man." That I call an
+ignoble image, and one cannot conceive of Emerson himself printing
+such a passage.</p>
+
+<p>We hear it said that Whittier is the typical poet of New England. It
+may be so, but Emerson is much the greater poet. Emerson is a poet of
+the world, while Whittier's work is hardly known abroad at all.
+Emerson is known wherever the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> English language is spoken. Not that
+Emerson is in any sense a popular poet, such as, for example, Burns or
+Byron, but he is the poet of the choice few, of those who seek poetry
+that has some intellectual or spiritual content. Whittier wrote many
+happy descriptions of New England scenes and seasons. "The Tent on the
+Beach" and "Snow-Bound" come readily to mind; "The Playmate" is a
+sweet poem, full of tender and human affection, but not a great poem.
+Whittier had no profundity. Is not a Quaker poet necessarily narrow?
+Whittier gave voice to the New England detestation of slavery, but by
+no means so forcibly and profoundly as did Emerson. He had a theology,
+but not a philosophy. I wonder if his poems are still read.</p>
+
+<p>In his chapter called "Considerations by the Way," Emerson strikes
+this curious false note in his rhetoric: "We have a right to be here
+or we should not be here. We have the same right to be here that Cape
+Cod and Sandy Hook have to be there." As if Cape Cod or Cape Horn or
+Sandy Hook had any "rights"! This comparison of man with inanimate
+things occurs in both Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau sins in this way at
+least once when he talks of the Attic wit of burning thorns and
+briars. There is a similar false note in such a careful writer as Dean
+Swift. He says to his young poet, "You are ever to try a good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> poem as
+you would a sound pipkin, and if it rings well upon the knuckle, be
+sure there is no flaw in it." Whitman compares himself with an
+inanimate thing in the line:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But he claims no moral or human attributes or rights for his level; it
+simply acts in obedience to the principle it embodies&mdash;the law of
+gravitation.</p>
+
+<p>The lecturer "gets away" with such things better than the writer. An
+audience is not critical about such matters, but the reader takes note
+of them. Mosaics will do on the platform, or in the pulpit, but will
+not bear the nearer view of the study.</p>
+
+<p>The incongruities of Emerson are seen in such passages as this: "Each
+plant has its parasites, and each created thing its lover and poet,"
+as if there were any relation between the two clauses of this
+sentence&mdash;between parasites and lovers and poets! As if one should
+say, "Woodchucks are often alive with fleas, and our fruit trees bloom
+in May."</p>
+
+<p>Emerson was so emboldened by what had been achieved through the
+mastery of the earth's forces that he was led to say that "a wise
+geology shall yet make the earthquake harmless, and the volcano an
+agricultural resource." But this seems expecting too much. We have
+harnessed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> lightnings, but the earthquake is too deep and too
+mighty for us. It is a steed upon which we cannot lay our hands. The
+volcano we may draw upon for heat and steam, as we do upon the winds
+and streams for power, but it is utterly beyond our control. The
+bending of the earth's crust beneath the great atmospheric waves is
+something we cannot bridle. The tides by sea as by land are beyond us.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson had the mind of the prophet and the seer, and was given to
+bold affirmations. The old Biblical distinction between the scribes
+and the man who speaks with authority still holds. We may say of all
+other New England essayists and poets&mdash;Lowell, Whipple, Tuckerman,
+Holmes, Hillard, Whittier, Longfellow&mdash;that they are scribes only.
+Emerson alone speaks as one having authority&mdash;the authority of the
+spirit. "Thus saith the Lord"&mdash;it is this tone that gives him his
+authority the world over.</p>
+
+<p>I never tire of those heroic lines of his in which he sounds a
+battle-cry to the spirit:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Though love repine, and reason chafe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There came a voice without reply,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">''T is man's perdition to be safe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When for the truth he ought to die.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The last time I saw Emerson was at the Holmes seventieth-birthday
+breakfast in 1879. The serious break in his health had resulted in a
+marked aphasia, so that he could not speak the name of his nearest
+friend, nor answer the simplest question.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> Yet he was as serene as
+ever. Let the heavens fall&mdash;what matters it to me? his look seemed to
+say.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson's face had in it more of what we call the divine than had that
+of any other author of his time&mdash;that wonderful, kindly, wise
+smile&mdash;the smile of the soul&mdash;not merely the smile of good nature, but
+the smile of spiritual welcome and hospitality.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson had quality. A good Emersonian will recognize any passage from
+the Sage in a book of quotations, even if no name is appended.</p>
+
+<p>We speak of Emerson as outgrown, yet only yesterday I saw in J. Arthur
+Thomson's recent Gifford Lectures on "The System of Animate Nature,"
+repeated quotations from Emerson, mainly from his poetry. I think he
+is no more likely to be outgrown than are Wordsworth and Arnold. Yet I
+do not set the same value upon his poetry that I do upon that of
+Wordsworth at his best.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson is the last man we should expect to be guilty of
+misinterpreting Nature, yet he does so at times. He does so in this
+passage: "If Nature wants a thumb, she makes it at the cost of the
+arms and legs." As if the arm were weaker or less efficient because of
+the thumb. What would man's power be as a tool-using animal without
+his strong, opposable thumb? His grasp would be gone.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He says truly that the gruesome, the disgusting, the repellent are not
+fit subjects for cabinet pictures. The "sacred subjects" to which he
+objects probably refer to the Crucifixion&mdash;the nails through the hands
+and feet, and the crown of thorns. But to jump from that fact to the
+assertion that Nature covers up the skeleton on the same grounds, is
+absurd. Do not all vertebrates require an osseous system? In the
+radiates and articulates she puts the bony system on the outside, but
+when she comes to her backbone animals, she perforce puts her osseous
+system beneath. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and
+skin and hair over it, not to hide it, but to use it. Would you have a
+man like a jellyfish?</p>
+
+<p>The same want of logic marks Carlyle's mind when he says: "The drop by
+continually falling bores its way through the hardest rock. The hasty
+torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace
+behind." But give the "hasty torrent" the same time you give the drop,
+and see what it will do to the rock!</p>
+
+<p>Emerson says, "A little more or a little less does not signify
+anything." But it does signify in this world of material things. Is
+one man as impressive as an army, one tree as impressive as a forest?
+"Scoop a little water in the hollow of your palm; take up a handful of
+shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span> acres
+of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? A little more or
+a little less signifies nothing." It is the mass that does impress us,
+as Niagara does, as the midnight sky does. It is not as parts of this
+"astonishing astronomy," or as a "part of the round globe under the
+optical sky"&mdash;we do not think of that, but the imagination is moved by
+the vast sweep of the ocean and its abysmal depths, and its ceaseless
+rocking. In some cases we see the All in the little; the law that
+spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is seen in leasts is an
+old Latin maxim. The soap bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the
+boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam engine; but a tumbler of
+water throws no light on the sea, though its sweating may help explain
+the rain.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson quotes Goethe as saying, "The beautiful is a manifestation of
+secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever
+concealed from us." As if beauty were an objective reality instead of
+a subjective experience! As if it were something out there in the
+landscape that you may gather your arms full of and bring in! If you
+are an artist, you may bring in your vision of it, pass it through
+your own mind, and thus embalm and preserve the beauty. Or if you are
+a poet, you may have a similar experience and reproduce it, humanized,
+in a poem. But the beauty is always a distilled and re-created, or,
+shall we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> say, an incarnated beauty&mdash;a tangible and measurable
+something, like moisture in the air, or sugar in the trees, or quartz
+in the rocks. There is, and can be, no "science of beauty." Beauty,
+like truth, is an experience of the mind. It is the emotion you feel
+when in health you look from your door or window of a May morning. If
+you are ill, or oppressed with grief, or worried, you will hardly
+experience the emotion of the beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson said he was warned by the fate of many philosophers not to
+attempt a definition of beauty. But in trying to describe it and
+characterize it he ran the same risk. "We ascribe beauty to that which
+is simple," he said; "which has no superfluous parts; which exactly
+answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean
+of many extremes." Is a boot-jack beautiful? Is a crow-bar? Yet these
+are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their
+ends, they stand related to all things through the laws of chemistry
+and physics. A flower is beautiful, a shell on the beach is beautiful,
+a tree in full leaf, or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these
+things are not very simple. Complex things may be beautiful also. A
+village church may be beautiful no less than a Gothic cathedral.
+Emerson was himself a beautiful writer, a beautiful character, and his
+works are a priceless addition to literature.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Go out of the house to see the moon," says Emerson, "and it is mere
+tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your
+necessary journey." This is not true in my experience. The stars do
+not become mere tinsel, do they, when we go out to look at the
+overwhelming spectacle? Neither does the moon. Is it not a delight in
+itself to look at the full moon&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as Whitman says?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The moon doth look round her with delight when the heavens are bare,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>says Wordsworth, and equally with delight do we regard the spectacle.
+The busy farmer in the fields rarely sees the beauty of Nature. He has
+not the necessary detachment. Put him behind his team and plough in
+the spring and he makes a pleasing picture to look upon, but the mind
+must be open to take in the beauty of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Of course Emerson is only emphasizing the fact of the beauty of
+utility, of the things we do, of the buildings we put up for use, and
+not merely for show. A hut, a log cabin in a clearing, a farmer's
+unpainted barn, all have elements of beauty. A man leading a horse to
+water, or foddering his cattle from a stack in a snow-covered field,
+or following his plough, is always pleasing. Every day I pass along a
+road by a wealthy man's estate and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> see a very elaborate stone wall of
+cobblestones and cement which marks the boundary of his estate on the
+highway. The wall does not bend and undulate with the inequalities of
+the ground; its top is as level as a foundation wall; it is an offense
+to every passer-by; it has none of the simplicity that should mark a
+division wall; it is studied and elaborate, and courts your
+admiration. How much more pleasing a rough wall of field stone, or
+"wild stone," as our old wall-layer put it, with which the farmer
+separates his fields! No thought of looks, but only of utility. The
+showy, the highly ornate castle which the multimillionaire builds on
+his estate&mdash;would an artist ever want to put one of them in his
+picture? Beauty is likely to flee when we make a dead set at her.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson's exaggerations are sometimes so excessive as to be simply
+amusing, as, when speaking of the feats of the imagination, he says,
+"My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors
+and constellations." The baseball, revolving as it flies, may suggest
+the orbs, or your girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your
+face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain by the soil; but
+does the blacking of your shoes suggest anything celestial? Hinges and
+levers and fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or old boots,
+have not much poetic significance. An elm tree may suggest a
+cathedral, or a shell sug<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>gest the rainbow, or the sparkling frost
+suggest diamonds, or the thread that holds the beads symbolize the law
+that strings the spheres, but a button is a button, a shoestring a
+shoestring, and a spade a spade, and nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>I cherish and revere the name of Emerson so profoundly, and owe him
+such a debt, that it seems, after all, a pity to point out the flaws
+in his precious amber.</p>
+
+<p>Let us keep alive the Emersonian memories: that such a man has lived
+and wrought among us. Let us teach our children his brave and heroic
+words, and plant our lives upon as secure an ethical foundation as he
+did. Let us make pilgrimages to Concord, and stand with uncovered
+heads beneath the pine tree where his ashes rest. He left us an estate
+in the fair land of the Ideal. He bequeathed us treasures that thieves
+cannot break through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor moth
+destroy.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> At the onset of the author's last illness he attempted to
+rearrange and improve this essay, but was even then unequal to it,
+and, after a little shifting and editing, gave it up. "Do what you can
+with it," he said; and when I asked him if he could not add a few
+words to close it, he sat up in bed, and wrote the closing sentences,
+which proved to be the last he ever penned.&mdash;C. B.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU</h3>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p>After Emerson, the name of no New England man of letters keeps greener
+and fresher than that of Thoreau. A severe censor of his countrymen,
+and with few elements of popularity, yet the quality of his thought,
+the sincerity of his life, and the nearness and perennial interest of
+his themes, as well as his rare powers of literary expression, win
+recruits from each generation of readers. He does not grow stale any
+more than Walden Pond itself grows stale. He is an obstinate fact
+there in New England life and literature, and at the end of his first
+centennial his fame is more alive than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July, 1817, and passed
+most of his life of forty-five years in his native town, minding his
+own business, as he would say, which consisted, for the most part, in
+spending at least the half of each day in the open air, winter and
+summer, rain and shine, and in keeping tab upon all the doings of wild
+nature about him and recording his observations in his Journal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The two race strains that met in Thoreau, the Scottish and the French,
+come out strongly in his life and character. To the French he owes his
+vivacity, his lucidity, his sense of style, and his passion for the
+wild; for the French, with all their urbanity and love of art, turn to
+nature very easily. To the Scot he is indebted more for his character
+than for his intellect. From this source come his contrariness, his
+combativeness, his grudging acquiescence, and his pronounced
+mysticism. Thence also comes his genius for solitude. The man who in
+his cabin in the woods has a good deal of company "especially the
+mornings when nobody calls," is French only in the felicity of his
+expression. But there is much in Thoreau that is neither Gallic nor
+Scottish, but pure Thoreau.</p>
+
+<p>The most point-blank and authoritative criticism within my knowledge
+that Thoreau has received at the hands of his countrymen came from the
+pen of Lowell about 1864, and was included in "My Study Windows." It
+has all the professional smartness and scholarly qualities which
+usually characterize Lowell's critical essays. Thoreau was vulnerable,
+both as an observer and as a literary craftsman, and Lowell lets him
+off pretty easily&mdash;too easily&mdash;on both counts.</p>
+
+<p>The flaws he found in his nature lore were very inconsiderable: "Till
+he built his Walden shack he did not know that the hickory grew near
+Con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>cord. Till he went to Maine he had never seen phosphorescent
+wood&mdash;a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he
+spoke of the seeding [<i>i. e.</i>, flowering]<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> of the pine as a new
+discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of
+blowing pollen might have earlier caught his eye."</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> See "Walking" in <i>Excursions</i>. He was under thirty-three
+when he made these observations (June, 1850).</p></div>
+
+<p>As regards his literary craftsmanship, Lowell charges him only with
+having revived the age of <i>concetti</i> while he fancied himself going
+back to a preclassical nature, basing the charge on such a far-fetched
+comparison as that in which Thoreau declares his preference for "the
+dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the
+moss-beds" over the wit of the Greek sages as it comes to us in the
+"Banquet" of Xenophon&mdash;a kind of perversity of comparison all too
+frequent with Thoreau.</p>
+
+<p>But though Lowell lets Thoreau off easily on these specific counts, he
+more than makes up by his sweeping criticism, on more general grounds,
+of his life and character. Here one feels that he overdoes the matter.</p>
+
+<p>It is not true, in the sense which Lowell implies, that Thoreau's
+whole life was a search for the doctor. It was such a search in no
+other sense than that we are all in search of the doctor when we take
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>a walk, or flee to the mountains or to the seashore, or seek to bring
+our minds and spirits in contact with "Nature's primal sanities." His
+search for the doctor turns out to be an escape from the conditions
+that make a doctor necessary. His wonderful activity, those long walks
+in all weathers, in all seasons, by night as well as by day, drenched
+by rain and chilled by frost, suggest a reckless kind of health. A
+doctor might wisely have cautioned him against such exposures. Nor was
+Thoreau a valetudinarian in his physical, moral, or intellectual
+fiber.</p>
+
+<p>It is not true, as Lowell charges, that it was his indolence that
+stood in the way of his taking part in the industrial activities in
+which his friends and neighbors engaged, or that it was his lack of
+persistence and purpose that hindered him. It is not true that he was
+poor because he looked upon money as an unmixed evil. Thoreau's
+purpose was like adamant, and his industry in his own proper pursuits
+was tireless. He knew the true value of money, and he knew also that
+the best things in life are to be had without money and without price.
+When he had need of money, he earned it. He turned his hand to many
+things&mdash;land-surveying, lecturing, magazine-writing, growing white
+beans, doing odd jobs at carpentering, whitewashing, fence-building,
+plastering, and brick-laying.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Lowell's criticism amounts almost to a diatribe. He was naturally
+antagonistic to the Thoreau type of mind. Coming from a man near his
+own age, and a neighbor, Thoreau's criticism of life was an affront to
+the smug respectability and scholarly attainments of the class to
+which Lowell belonged. Thoreau went his own way, with an air of
+defiance and contempt which, no doubt, his contemporaries were more
+inclined to resent than we are at our distance. Shall this man in his
+hut on the shores of Walden Pond assume to lay down the law and the
+gospel to his elders and betters, and pass unrebuked, no matter on
+what intimate terms he claims to be with the gods of the woods and
+mountains? This seems to be Lowell's spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"Thoreau's experiment," says Lowell, "actually presupposed all that
+complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted
+on another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his
+bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough,
+his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the
+sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that
+such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." Very clever,
+but what of it? Of course Thoreau was a product of the civilization he
+decried. He was a product of his country and his times. He was born in
+Concord and early came under the influence of Emerson; he was a
+graduate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> of Harvard University and all his life availed himself, more
+or less, of the accumulated benefits of state and social
+organizations. When he took a train to Boston, or dropped a letter in,
+or received one through, the post office, or read a book, or visited a
+library, or looked in a newspaper, he was a sharer in these benefits.
+He made no claims to living independently of the rest of mankind. His
+only aim in his Walden experiment was to reduce life to its lowest
+terms, to drive it into a corner, as he said, and question and
+cross-question it, and see, if he could, what it really meant. And he
+probably came as near cornering it there in his hut on Walden Pond as
+any man ever did anywhere, certainly in a way more pleasing to
+contemplate than did the old hermits in the desert, or than did
+Diogenes in his tub, though Lowell says the tub of the old Greek had a
+sounder bottom.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell seemed to discredit Thoreau by attacking his philosophy and
+pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies of a man who
+abjures the civilization of which he is the product, overlooking the
+fact that man's theories and speculations may be very wide of the
+truth as we view it, and yet his life be noble and inspiring. Now
+Thoreau did not give us a philosophy, but a life. He gave us fresh and
+beautiful literature, he gave us our first and probably only nature
+classic, he gave us an example of plain living and high think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>ing that
+is always in season, and he took upon himself that kind of noble
+poverty that carries the suggestion of wealth of soul.</p>
+
+<p>No matter how much Thoreau abjured our civilization, he certainly made
+good use of the weapons it gave him. No matter whose lands he squatted
+on, or whose saw he borrowed, or to whom or what he was indebted for
+the tools and utensils that made his life at Walden possible,&mdash;these
+things were the mere accidents of his environment,&mdash;he left a record
+of his life and thoughts there which is a precious heritage to his
+countrymen. The best in his books ranks with the best in the
+literature of his times. One could wish that he had shown more
+tolerance for the things other men live for, but this must not make us
+overlook the value of the things he himself lived for, though with
+some of his readers his intolerance doubtless has this effect. We
+cannot all take to the woods and swamps as Thoreau did. He had a
+genius for that kind of a life; the most of us must stick to our farms
+and desks and shops and professions.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau retired to Walden for study and contemplation, and because, as
+he said, he had a little private business with himself. He found that
+by working about six weeks in the year he could meet all his living
+expenses, and then have all his winter and most of his summers free
+and clear for study. He found that to maintain one's self on this
+earth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> is not a hardship, but a pastime, if one will live simply and
+wisely. He said, "It is not necessary that a man should earn his
+living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do."
+Was not his experiment worth while?</p>
+
+<p>"Walden" is a wonderful and delightful piece of brag, but it is much
+more than that. It is literature; it is a Gospel of the Wild. It made
+a small Massachusetts pond famous, and the Mecca of many devout
+pilgrims.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell says that Thoreau had no humor, but there are many pages in
+"Walden" that are steeped in a quiet but most delicious humor. His
+humor brings that inward smile which is the badge of art's felicity.
+His "Bean-Field" is full of it. I venture to say that never before had
+a hermit so much fun with a field of white beans.</p>
+
+<p>Both by training and by temperament Lowell was disqualified from
+entering into Thoreau's character and aims. Lowell's passion for books
+and academic accomplishments was as strong as was Thoreau's passion
+for the wild and for the religion of Nature. When Lowell went to
+Nature for a theme, as in his "Good Word for Winter," his "My Garden
+Acquaintance," and the "Moosehead Journal," his use of it was mainly
+to unlock the treasures of his literary and scholarly attainments; he
+bedecked and be jeweled Nature with gems from all the literatures of
+the world. In the "Journal"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> we get more of the flavor of libraries
+than of the Maine woods and waters. No reader of Lowell can doubt that
+he was a nature-lover, nor can he doubt that he loved books and
+libraries more. In all his nature writings the poverty of the
+substance and the wealth of the treatment are striking. The final
+truth about Lowell's contributions is that his mind was essentially a
+prose mind, even when he writes poetry. Emerson said justly that his
+tone was always that of prose. What is his "Cathedral" but versified
+prose? Like so many cultivated men, he showed a talent for poetry, but
+not genius; as, on the other hand, one may say of Emerson that he
+showed more genius for poetry than talent, his inspiration surpassed
+his technical skill.</p>
+
+<p>One is not surprised when he finds that John Brown was one of
+Thoreau's heroes; he was a sort of John Brown himself in another
+sphere; but one is surprised when one finds him so heartily approving
+of Walt Whitman and traveling to Brooklyn to look upon him and hear
+his voice. He recognized at once the tremendous significance of
+Whitman and the power of his poetry. He called him the greatest
+democrat which the world had yet seen. With all his asceticism and his
+idealism, he was not troubled at all with those things in Whitman that
+are a stumbling-block to so many persons. Evidently his long
+intercourse with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> Nature had prepared him for the primitive and
+elemental character of Whitman's work. No doubt also his familiarity
+with the great poems and sacred books of the East helped him. At any
+rate, in this respect, his endorsement of Whitman adds greatly to our
+conception of the mental and spiritual stature of Thoreau.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I can hold my criticism in the back of my head while I say with my
+forehead that all our other nature writers seem tame and insipid
+beside Thoreau. He was so much more than a mere student and observer
+of nature; and it is this surplusage which gives the extra weight and
+value to his nature writing. He was a critic of life, he was a
+literary force that made for plain living and high thinking. His
+nature lore was an aside; he gathered it as the meditative saunterer
+gathers a leaf, or a flower, or a shell on the beach, while he ponders
+on higher things. He had other business with the gods of the woods
+than taking an inventory of their wares. He was a dreamer, an
+idealist, a fervid ethical teacher, seeking inspiration in the fields
+and woods. The hound, the turtle-dove, and the bay horse which he said
+he had lost, and for whose trail he was constantly seeking, typified
+his interest in wild nature. The natural history in his books is quite
+secondary. The natural or supernatural history of his own thought
+absorbed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> him more than the exact facts about the wild life around
+him. He brings us a gospel more than he brings us a history. His
+science is only the handmaid of his ethics; his wood-lore is the foil
+of his moral and intellectual teachings. His observations are
+frequently at fault, or wholly wide of the mark; but the flower or
+specimen that he brings you always "comes laden with a thought." There
+is a tang and a pungency to nearly everything he published; the
+personal quality which flavors it is like the formic acid which the
+bee infuses into the nectar he gets from the flower, and which makes
+it honey.</p>
+
+<p>I feel that some such statement about Thoreau should precede or go
+along with any criticism of him as a writer or as an observer. He was,
+first and last, a moral force speaking in the terms of the literary
+naturalist.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's prayer in one of his poems&mdash;that he might greatly disappoint
+his friends&mdash;seems to have been answered. While his acquaintances went
+into trade or the professions, he cast about to see what he could do
+to earn his living and still be true to the call of his genius. In his
+Journal of 1851 he says: "While formerly I was looking about to see
+what I could do for a living, some sad experiences in conforming to
+the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I
+thought often and seriously of picking huckleber<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>ries; that surely I
+could do, and its small profits might suffice, so little capital is
+required, so little distraction from my wonted thoughts." He could
+range the hills in summer and still look after the flocks of King
+Admetus. He also dreamed that he might gather the wild herbs and carry
+evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods. But
+he soon learned that trade cursed everything, and that "though you
+trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to
+the business." The nearest his conscience would allow him to approach
+any kind of trade was to offer himself to his townsmen as a
+land-surveyor. This would take him to the places where he liked to be;
+he could still walk in the fields and woods and swamps and earn his
+living thereby. The chain and compass became him well, quite as well
+as his bean-field at Walden, and the little money they brought him was
+not entirely sordid.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his happy moods in "Walden" he sets down in a
+half-facetious, half-mystical, but wholly delightful way, his various
+avocations, such as his self-appointment as inspector of snow-storms
+and rain-storms, and surveyor of forest paths and all across-lot
+routes, and herdsman of the wild stock of the town. He is never more
+enjoyable than in such passages. His account of going into business at
+Walden Pond is in the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> happy vein. As his fellow citizens were
+slow in offering him any opening in which he could earn a living, he
+turned to the woods, where he was better known, and determined to go
+into business at once without waiting to acquire the usual capital. He
+expected to open trade with the Celestial Empire, and Walden was just
+the place to start the venture. He thought his strict business habits
+acquired through years of keeping tab on wild Nature's doings, his
+winter days spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the
+wind, and his early spring mornings before his neighbors were astir to
+hear the croak of the first frog, all the training necessary to ensure
+success in business with the Celestial Empire. He admits, it is true,
+that he never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but doubted
+not that it was of the last importance only to be present at it. All
+such fooling as this is truly delightful. When he goes about his
+sylvan business with his tongue in his cheek and a quizzical,
+good-humored look upon his face in this way, and advertises the hound,
+the bay horse, and the turtle-dove he lost so long ago, he is the true
+Thoreau, and we take him to our hearts.</p>
+
+<p>One also enjoys the way in which he magnifies his petty occupations.
+His brag over his bean-field is delightful. He makes one want to hoe
+beans with him:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to
+the woods and the sky and was an accompaniment to my labor
+which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no
+longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I
+remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at
+all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the
+oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny
+afternoons&mdash;for I sometimes made a day of it&mdash;like a mote in
+the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with
+a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at
+last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope
+remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on
+the ground on bare sand or rocks on the top of hills, where
+few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples
+caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to
+float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The
+hawk is a&euml;rial brother of the wave which he sails over and
+surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to
+the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I
+watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky,
+alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving
+one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own
+thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons
+from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing
+sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe
+turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish salamander, a
+trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I
+paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard
+and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible
+entertainment which the country offers.</p></div>
+
+<p>All this is in his best style. Who, after reading it, does not long
+for a bean-field? In planting it, too what music attends him!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the
+brown thrasher&mdash;or red mavis, as some love to call him&mdash;all
+the morning, glad of your society, that would find out
+another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are
+planting the seed he cries,&mdash;"Drop it, drop it,&mdash;cover it
+up, cover it up,&mdash;pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But
+this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as
+he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini
+performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with
+your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or
+plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had
+entire faith.</p></div>
+
+<p>What lessons he got in botany in the hoeing!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes
+with various kinds of weeds,&mdash;it will bear some iteration in
+the account, for there was no little iteration in the
+labor,&mdash;disturbing their delicate organizations so
+ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his
+hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously
+cultivating another. That's Roman worm-wood,&mdash;that's
+pigweed,&mdash;that's sorrel,&mdash;that's pipergrass,&mdash;have at him,
+chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him
+have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'
+other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long
+war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had
+sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me
+come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of
+their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many
+a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above
+his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in
+the dust.</p>
+
+<p>I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when
+the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an
+old settler and original proprietor, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span> is reported to
+have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with
+pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new
+eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful
+evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even
+without apples or cider,&mdash;a most wise and humorous friend,
+whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever
+did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead,
+none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too,
+dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in
+whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes,
+gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a
+genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back
+farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of
+every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the
+incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old
+dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is
+likely to outlive all her children yet.</p></div>
+
+<p>Thoreau taxed himself to find words and images strong enough to
+express his aversion to the lives of the men who were "engaged" in the
+various industrial fields about him. Everywhere in shops and offices
+and fields it appeared to him that his neighbors were doing penance in
+a thousand remarkable ways:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires
+and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended,
+with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the
+heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible
+for them to resume their natural position, while from the
+twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the
+stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a
+tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the
+breadth of vast empires;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> or standing on one leg on the tops
+of pillars,&mdash;even these forms of conscious penance are
+hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which
+I daily witness.... I see young men, my townsmen, whose
+misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns,
+cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily
+acquired than got rid of.</p></div>
+
+<p>Surely this disciple of the Gospel of the Wild must have disappointed
+his friends. It was this audacious gift which Thoreau had for making
+worldly possessions seem ignoble, that gives the tang to many pages of
+his writings.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau became a great traveler&mdash;in Concord, as he says&mdash;and made
+Walden Pond famous in our literature by spending two or more years in
+the woods upon its shore, and writing an account of his sojourn there
+which has become a nature classic. He was a poet-naturalist, as his
+friend Channing aptly called him, of untiring industry, and the
+country in a radius of seven or eight miles about Concord was threaded
+by him in all seasons as probably no other section of New England was
+ever threaded and scrutinized by any one man. Walking in the fields
+and woods, and recording what he saw and heard and thought in his
+Journal, became the business of his life. He went over the same ground
+endlessly, but always brought back new facts, or new impressions,
+because he was so sensitive to all the changing features of the day
+and the season in the landscape about him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Once he extended his walking as far as Quebec, Canada, and once he
+took in the whole of Cape Cod; three or four times he made excursions
+to the Maine woods, the result of which gave the name to one of his
+most characteristic volumes; but as habitually as the coming of the
+day was he a walker about Concord, in all seasons, primarily for
+companionship with untamed Nature, and secondarily as a gleaner in the
+fields of natural history.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p>Thoreau was not a great philosopher, he was not a great naturalist, he
+was not a great poet, but as a nature-writer and an original character
+he is unique in our literature. His philosophy begins and ends with
+himself, or is entirely subjective, and is frequently fantastic, and
+nearly always illogical. His poetry is of the oracular kind, and is
+only now and then worth attention. There are crudities in his writings
+that make the conscientious literary craftsman shudder; there are
+mistakes of observation that make the serious naturalist wonder; and
+there is often an expression of contempt for his fellow countrymen,
+and the rest of mankind, and their aims in life, that makes the
+judicious grieve. But at his best there is a gay symbolism, a felicity
+of description, and a freshness of observation that delight all
+readers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As a person he gave himself to others reluctantly; he was, in truth, a
+recluse. He stood for character more than for intellect, and for
+intuition more than for reason. He was often contrary and
+inconsistent. There was more crust than crumb in the loaf he gave us.</p>
+
+<p>He went about the business of living with his head in the clouds, or
+with an absolute devotion to the ideal that is certainly rare in our
+literary history. He declared that he aimed to crow like chanticleer
+in the morning, if only to wake his neighbors up. Much of his writings
+have this chanticleerian character; they are a call to wake up, to rub
+the film from one's eyes, and see the real values of life. To this end
+he prods with paradoxes, he belabors with hyperboles, he teases with
+irony, he startles with the unexpected. He finds poverty more
+attractive than riches, solitude more welcome than society, a sphagnum
+swamp more to be desired than a flowered field.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau is suggestive of those antibodies which modern science makes
+so much of. He tends to fortify us against the dry rot of business,
+the seductions of social pleasures, the pride of wealth and position.
+He is antitoxic; he is a literary germicide of peculiar power. He is
+too religious to go to church, too patriotic to pay his taxes, too
+fervent a humanist to interest himself in the social welfare of his
+neighborhood.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thoreau called himself a mystic, and a transcendentalist, and a
+natural philosopher to boot. But the least of these was the natural
+philosopher. He did not have the philosophic mind, nor the scientific
+mind; he did not inquire into the reason of things, nor the meaning of
+things; in fact, had no disinterested interest in the universe apart
+from himself. He was too personal and illogical for a philosopher. The
+scientific interpretation of things did not interest him at all. He
+was interested in things only so far as they related to Henry Thoreau.
+He interpreted Nature entirely in the light of his own idiosyncrasies.</p>
+
+<p>Science goes its own way in spite of our likes and dislikes, but
+Thoreau's likes and dislikes determined everything for him. He was
+stoical, but not philosophical. His intellect had no free play outside
+his individual predilection. Truth as philosophers use the term, was
+not his quest but truth made in Concord.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau writes that when he was once asked by the Association for the
+Advancement of Science what branch of science he was especially
+interested in, he did not reply because he did not want to make
+himself the laughing-stock of the scientific community, which did not
+believe in a science which deals with the higher law&mdash;his higher law,
+which bears the stamp of Henry Thoreau.</p>
+
+<p>He was an individualist of the most pronounced<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> type. The penalty of
+this type of mind is narrowness; the advantage is the personal flavor
+imparted to the written page. Thoreau's books contain plenty of the
+pepper and salt of character and contrariness; even their savor of
+whim and prejudice adds to their literary tang. When his individualism
+becomes aggressive egotism, as often happens, it is irritating; but
+when it gives only that pungent and personal flavor which pervades
+much of "Walden," it is very welcome.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's critics justly aver that he severely arraigns his countrymen
+because they are not all Thoreaus&mdash;that they do not desert their farms
+and desks and shops and take to the woods. What unmeasured contempt he
+pours out upon the lives and ambitions of most of them! Need a
+nature-lover, it is urged, necessarily be a man-hater? Is not man a
+part of nature?&mdash;averaging up quite as good as the total scheme of
+things out of which he came? Cannot his vices and shortcomings be
+matched by a thousand cruel and abortive things in the fields and the
+woods? The fountain cannot rise above its source, and man is as good
+as is the nature out of which he came, and of which he is a part. Most
+of Thoreau's harsh judgments upon his neighbors and countrymen are
+only his extreme individualism gone to seed.</p>
+
+<p>An extremist he always was. Extreme views commended themselves to him
+because they were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> extreme. His aim in writing was usually "to make an
+extreme statement." He left the middle ground to the school committees
+and trustees. He had in him the stuff of which martyrs and heroes are
+made. In John Brown he recognized a kindred soul. But his literary
+bent led him to take his own revolutionary impulses out in words. The
+closest he came to imitation of the hero of Harper's Ferry and to
+defying the Government was on one occasion when he refused to pay his
+poll-tax and thus got himself locked in jail overnight. It all seems a
+petty and ignoble ending of his fierce denunciation of politics and
+government, but it no doubt helped to satisfy his imagination, which
+so tyrannized over him throughout life. He could endure offenses
+against his heart and conscience and reason easier than against his
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>He presents that curious phenomenon of a man who is an extreme product
+of culture and civilization, and yet who so hungers and thirsts for
+the wild and the primitive that he is unfair to the forces and
+conditions out of which he came, and by which he is at all times
+nourished and upheld. He made his excursions into the Maine wilderness
+and lived in his hut by Walden Pond as a scholar and philosopher, and
+not at all in the spirit of the lumbermen and sportsmen whose wildness
+he so much admired. It was from his vantage-ground of culture and of
+Concord transcendentalism that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> he appraised all these types. It was
+from a community built up and sustained by the common industries and
+the love of gain that he decried all these things. It was from a town
+and a civilization that owed much to the pine tree that he launched
+his diatribe against the lumbermen in the Maine woods: "The pine is no
+more lumber than man is; and to be made into boards and houses no more
+its true and highest use than the truest use of man is to be cut down
+and made into manure." Not a happy comparison, but no matter. If the
+pine tree had not been cut down and made into lumber, it is quite
+certain that Thoreau would never have got to the Maine woods to utter
+this protest, just as it is equally certain that had he not been a
+member of a thrifty and industrious community, and kept his hold upon
+it, he could not have made his Walden experiment of toying and
+coquetting with the wild and the non-industrial. His occupations as
+land-surveyor, lyceum lecturer, and magazine writer attest how much he
+owed to the civilization he was so fond of decrying. This is Thoreau's
+weakness&mdash;the half-truths in which he plumes himself, as if they were
+the whole law and gospel. His Walden bean-field was only a pretty
+piece of play-acting; he cared more for the ringing of his hoe upon
+the stones than for the beans. Had his living really depended upon the
+product, the sound would not have pleased him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> so, and the botany of
+the weeds he hoed under would not have so interested him.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's half-truths titillate and amuse the mind. We do not nod over
+his page. We enjoy his art while experiencing an undercurrent of
+protest against his unfairness. We could have wished him to have shown
+himself in his writings as somewhat sweeter and more tolerant toward
+the rest of the world, broader in outlook, and more just and
+charitable in disposition&mdash;more like his great prototype, Emerson, who
+could do full justice to the wild and the spontaneous without doing an
+injustice to their opposites; who could see the beauty of the pine
+tree, yet sing the praises of the pine-tree State House; who could
+arraign the Government, yet pay his taxes; who could cherish Thoreau,
+and yet see all his limitations. Emerson affirmed more than he denied,
+and his charity was as broad as his judgment. He set Thoreau a good
+example in bragging, but he bragged to a better purpose. He exalted
+the present moment, the universal fact, the omnipotence of the moral
+law, the sacredness of private judgment; he pitted the man of to-day
+against all the saints and heroes of history; and, although he decried
+traveling, he was yet considerable of a traveler, and never tried to
+persuade himself that Concord was an epitome of the world. Emerson
+comes much nearer being a national figure than does Thoreau, and yet
+Thoreau, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> reason of his very narrowness and perversity, and by his
+intense local character, united to the penetrating character of his
+genius, has made an enduring impression upon our literature.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p>Thoreau's life was a search for the wild. He was the great disciple of
+the Gospel of Walking. He elevated walking into a religious exercise.
+One of his most significant and entertaining chapters is on "Walking."
+No other writer that I recall has set forth the Gospel of Walking so
+eloquently and so stimulatingly. Thoreau's religion and his philosophy
+are all in this chapter. It is his most mature, his most complete and
+comprehensive statement. He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my
+life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking
+walks&mdash;who had a genius, so to speak, for <i>sauntering</i>,
+which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who
+roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked
+charity, under pretence of going <i>&agrave; la Sainte Terre</i>," to
+the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a
+<i>Sainte-Terrer</i>,"&mdash;a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who
+never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend,
+are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go
+there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean....
+For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter
+the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land
+from the hands of the Infidels.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thoreau was the first man in this country, or in any other, so far as
+I know, who made a religion of walking&mdash;the first to announce a Gospel
+of the Wild. That he went forth into wild nature in much the same
+spirit that the old hermits went into the desert, and was as devout in
+his way as they were in theirs, is revealed by numerous passages in
+his Journal. He would make his life a sacrament; he discarded the old
+religious terms and ideas, and struck out new ones of his own:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>What more glorious condition of being can we imagine than
+from impure to become pure? May I not forget that I am
+impure and vicious! May I not cease to love purity! May I go
+to my slumbers as expecting to arise to a new and more
+perfect day! May I so live and refine my life as fitting
+myself for a society ever higher than I actually enjoy!</p>
+
+<p>To watch for and describe all the divine features which I
+detect in nature! My profession is to be always on the alert
+to find God in nature, to know his lurking-place, to attend
+all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! I would walk, I would sit, and sleep, with natural
+piety. What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went
+along the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds? For
+joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried
+in it.</p>
+
+<p>I do not deserve anything. I am unworthy the least regard,
+and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and
+yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are
+prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. But I
+cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to
+the human friends I have.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the essay on "Walking," Thoreau says that the art of walking "comes
+only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
+Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
+Walkers." "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,
+unless I spend four hours a day at least,&mdash;it is commonly more than
+that,&mdash;sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
+absolutely free from all worldly engagements."</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau made good his boast. He was a new kind of walker, a
+Holy-Lander. His walks yielded him mainly spiritual and ideal results.
+The fourteen published volumes of his Journal are mainly a record of
+his mental reactions to the passing seasons and to the landscape he
+sauntered through. There is a modicum of natural history, but mostly
+he reaps the intangible harvest of the poet, the saunterer, the
+mystic, the super-sportsman.</p>
+
+<p>With his usual love of paradox Thoreau says that the fastest way to
+travel is to go afoot, because, one may add, the walker is constantly
+arriving at his destination; all places are alike to him, his harvest
+grows all along the road and beside every path, in every field and
+wood and on every hilltop.</p>
+
+<p>All of Thoreau's books belong to the literature of Walking, and are as
+true in spirit in Paris or London as in Concord. His natural history,
+for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> which he had a passion, is the natural history of the walker, not
+always accurate, as I have pointed out, but always graphic and
+interesting.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth was about the first poet-walker&mdash;a man of letters who made
+a business of walking, and whose study was really the open air. But he
+was not a Holy-Lander in the Thoreau sense. He did not walk to get
+away from people as Thoreau did, but to see a greater variety of them,
+and to gather suggestions for his poems. Not so much the wild as the
+human and the morally significant were the objects of Wordsworth's
+quest. He haunted waterfalls and fells and rocky heights and lonely
+tarns, but he was not averse to footpaths and highways, and the
+rustic, half-domesticated nature of rural England. He was a
+nature-lover; he even calls himself a nature-worshiper; and he appears
+to have walked as many, or more, hours each day, in all seasons, as
+did Thoreau; but he was hunting for no lost paradise of the wild; nor
+waging a war against the arts and customs of civilization. Man and
+life were at the bottom of his interest in Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth never knew the wild as we know it in this country&mdash;the
+pitilessly savage and rebellious; and, on the other hand, he never
+knew the wonderfully delicate and furtive and elusive nature that we
+know; but he knew the sylvan, the pastoral, the rustic-human, as we
+cannot know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> them. British birds have nothing plaintive in their
+songs; and British woods and fells but little that is disorderly and
+cruel in their expression, or violent in their contrasts.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth gathered his finest poetic harvest from common nature and
+common humanity about him&mdash;the wayside birds and flowers and
+waterfalls, and the wayside people. Though he called himself a
+worshiper of Nature, it was Nature in her half-human moods that he
+adored&mdash;Nature that knows no extremes, and that has long been under
+the influence of man&mdash;a soft, humid, fertile, docile Nature, that
+suggests a domesticity as old and as permanent as that of cattle and
+sheep. His poetry reflects these features, reflects the high moral and
+historic significance of the European landscape, while the poetry of
+Emerson, and of Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness of
+our more capricious and unkempt Nature.</p>
+
+<p>The walker has no axe to grind; he sniffs the air for new adventure;
+he loiters in old scenes, he gleans in old fields. He only seeks
+intimacy with Nature to surprise her preoccupied with her own affairs.
+He seeks her in the woods, the swamps, on the hills, along the
+streams, by night and by day, in season and out of season. He skims
+the fields and hillsides as the swallow skims the air, and what he
+gets is intangible to most persons. He sees much with his eyes, but he
+sees more with his heart<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> and imagination. He bathes in Nature as in a
+sea. He is alert for the beauty that waves in the trees, that ripples
+in the grass and grain, that flows in the streams, that drifts in the
+clouds, that sparkles in the dew and rain. The hammer of the
+geologist, the notebook of the naturalist, the box of the herbalist,
+the net of the entomologist, are not for him. He drives no sharp
+bargains with Nature, he reads no sermons in stones, no books in
+running brooks, but he does see good in everything. The book he reads
+he reads through all his senses&mdash;through his eyes, his ears, his nose,
+and also through his feet and hands&mdash;and its pages are open
+everywhere; the rocks speak of more than geology to him, the birds of
+more than ornithology, the flowers of more than botany, the stars of
+more than astronomy, the wild creatures of more than zo&ouml;logy.</p>
+
+<p>The average walker is out for exercise and the exhilarations of the
+road, he reaps health and strength; but Thoreau evidently impaired his
+health by his needless exposure and inadequate food. He was a
+Holy-Lander who falls and dies in the Holy Land. He ridiculed walking
+for exercise&mdash;taking a walk as the sick take medicine; the walk itself
+was to be the "enterprise and adventure of the day." And "you must
+walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates
+while walking."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+<p>Thoreau's friends and neighbors seem to have persuaded themselves that
+his natural-history lore was infallible, and, moreover, that he
+possessed some mysterious power over the wild creatures about him that
+other men did not possess. I recall how Emerson fairly bristled up
+when on one occasion while in conversation with him I told him I
+thought Thoreau in his trips to the Maine woods had confounded the
+hermit thrush with the wood thrush, as the latter was rarely or never
+found in Maine. As for Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures,
+Emerson voiced this superstition when he said, "Snakes coiled round
+his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them from the
+water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took
+the foxes under his protection from the hunters." Of course Thoreau
+could do nothing with the wild creatures that you or I could not do
+under the same conditions. A snake will coil around any man's leg if
+he steps on its tail, but it will not be an embrace of affection; and
+a fish will swim into his hands under the same conditions that it will
+into Thoreau's. As for pulling a woodchuck out of its hole by the
+tail, the only trouble is to get hold of the tail. The 'chuck is
+pretty careful to keep his tail behind him, but many a farm boy, aided
+by his dog, has pulled one out of the stone wall by the tail, much
+against the 'chuck's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> will. If Thoreau's friends were to claim that he
+could carry <i>Mephitis mephitica</i> by the tail with impunity, I can say
+I have done the same thing, and had my photograph taken in the act.
+The skunk is no respecter of persons, and here again the trouble is to
+get hold of the tail at the right moment&mdash;and, I may add, to let go of
+it at the right moment.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures is what every man
+possesses who is alike gentle in his approach to them. Bradford Torrey
+succeeded, after a few experiments, in so dispelling the fears of an
+incubating red-eyed vireo that she would take insect food from his
+hand, and I have known several persons to become so familiar with the
+chickadees that they would feed from the hand, and in some instances
+even take food from between the lips. If you have a chipmunk for a
+neighbor, you may soon become on such intimate terms with him that he
+will search your pockets for nuts and sit on your knee and shoulder
+and eat them. But why keep alive and circulate as truth these animal
+legends of the prescientific ages?</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau was not a born naturalist, but a born supernaturalist. He was
+too intent upon the bird behind the bird always to take careful note
+of the bird itself. He notes the birds, but not too closely. He was at
+times a little too careless in this respect to be a safe guide to the
+bird-student. Even the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> saunterer to the Holy Land ought to know the
+indigo bunting from the black-throated blue warbler, with its languid,
+midsummery, "Zee, zee, zee-eu."</p>
+
+<p>Many of his most interesting natural-history notes Thoreau got from
+his farmer friends&mdash;Melvin, Minott, Miles, Hubbard, Wheeler. Their
+eyes were more single to the life around them than were his; none of
+them had lost a hound, a turtle-dove, and a bay horse, whose trail
+they were daily in quest of.</p>
+
+<p>A haunter of swamps and river marshes all his life, he had never yet
+observed how the night bittern made its booming or pumping sound, but
+accepted the explanation of one of his neighbors that it was produced
+by the bird thrusting its bill in water, sucking up as much as it
+could hold, and then pumping it out again with four or five heaves of
+the neck, throwing the water two or three feet&mdash;in fact, turning
+itself into a veritable pump! I have stood within a few yards of the
+bird when it made the sound, and seen the convulsive movement of the
+neck and body, and the lifting of the head as the sound escaped. The
+bird seems literally to vomit up its notes, but it does not likewise
+emit water.</p>
+
+<p>Every farmer and fox-hunter would smile if he read Thoreau's
+statement, made in his paper on the natural history of Massachusetts,
+that "when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep, you
+may give chase and come up with the fox on foot." Evidently Thoreau
+had never tried it. With a foot and a half, or two feet of snow on the
+ground, and traveling on snowshoes, you might force a fox to take to
+his hole, but you would not come up to him. In four or five feet of
+soft snow hunters come up with the deer, and ride on their backs for
+amusement, but I doubt if a red fox ever ventures out in such a depth
+of snow. In one of his May walks in 1860, Thoreau sees the trail of
+the musquash in the mud along the river-bottoms, and he is taken by
+the fancy that, as our roads and city streets often follow the early
+tracks of the cow, so "rivers in another period follow the trail of
+the musquash." As if the river was not there before the musquash was!</p>
+
+<p>Again, his mysterious "night warbler," to which he so often alludes,
+was one of our common everyday birds which most school-children know,
+namely, the oven-bird, or wood-accentor, yet to Thoreau it was a sort
+of phantom bird upon which his imagination loved to dwell. Emerson
+told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should
+have nothing more to show him. But how such a haunter of woods escaped
+identifying the bird is a puzzle.</p>
+
+<p>In his walks in the Maine woods Thoreau failed to discriminate the
+song of the hermit thrush from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span> that of the wood thrush. The melody,
+no doubt, went to his heart, and that was enough. Though he sauntered
+through orchards and rested under apple trees, he never observed that
+the rings of small holes in the bark were usually made by the
+yellow-bellied woodpecker, instead of by Downy, and that the bird was
+not searching for grubs or insects, but was feeding upon the milky
+cambium layer of the inner bark.</p>
+
+<p>But Thoreau's little slips of the kind I have called attention to
+count as nothing against the rich harvest of natural-history notes
+with which his work abounds. He could describe bird-songs and animal
+behavior and give these things their right emphasis in the life of the
+landscape as no other New England writer has done. His account of the
+battle of the ants in Walden atones an hundred-fold for the lapses I
+have mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>One wonders just what Thoreau means when he says in "Walden," in
+telling of his visit to "Baker Farm": "Once it chanced that I stood in
+the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum
+of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling
+me as if I looked through colored crystal." Is it possible, then, to
+reach the end of the rainbow? Why did he not dig for the pot of gold
+that is buried there? How he could be aware that he was standing at
+the foot of one leg of the glowing arch is to me a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> mystery. When I
+see a rainbow, it is always immediately in front of me. I am standing
+exactly between the highest point of the arch and the sun, and the
+laws of optics ordain that it can be seen in no other way. You can
+never see a rainbow at an angle. It always faces you squarely. Hence
+no two persons see exactly the same bow, because no two persons can
+occupy exactly the same place at the same time. The bow you see is
+directed to you alone. Move to the right or the left, and it moves as
+fast as you do. You cannot flank it or reach its end. It is about the
+most subtle and significant phenomenon that everyday Nature presents
+to us. Unapproachable as a spirit, like a visitant from another world,
+yet the creation of the familiar sun and rain!</p>
+
+<p>How Thoreau found himself standing in the bow's abutment will always
+remain a puzzle to me. Observers standing on high mountains with the
+sun low in the west have seen the bow as a complete circle. This one
+can understand.</p>
+
+<p>We can point many a moral and adorn many a tale with Thoreau's
+shortcomings and failures in his treatment of nature themes. Channing
+quotes him as saying that sometimes "you must see with the inside of
+your eye." I think that Thoreau saw, or tried to see, with the inside
+of his eye too often. He does not always see correctly, and many times
+he sees more of Thoreau than he does of the nature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> he assumes to be
+looking at. Truly it is "needless to travel for wonders," but the
+wonderful is not one with the fantastic or the far-fetched. Forcible
+expression, as I have said, was his ruling passion as a writer. Only
+when he is free from its thrall, which in his best moments he surely
+is, does he write well. When he can forget Thoreau and remember only
+nature, we get those delightful descriptions and reflections in
+"Walden." When he goes to the Maine woods or to Cape Cod or to Canada,
+he leaves all his fantastic rhetoric behind him and gives us sane and
+refreshing books. In his walks with Channing one suspects he often let
+himself go to all lengths, did his best to turn the world inside out,
+as he did at times in his Journals, for his own edification and that
+of his wondering disciple.</p>
+
+<p>To see analogies and resemblances everywhere is the gift of genius,
+but to see a resemblance to volcanoes in the hubs or gnarls on birch
+or beech trees, or cathedral windows in the dead leaves of the
+andromeda in January, or a suggestion of Teneriffe in a stone-heap,
+does not indicate genius. To see the great in the little, or the whole
+of Nature in any of her parts, is the poet's gift, but to ask, after
+seeing the andropogon grass, "Are there no purple reflections from the
+culms of thought in my mind?"&mdash;a remark which Channing quotes as very
+significant&mdash;is not to be poetical. Thoreau is full<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> of these
+impossible and fantastic comparisons, thinking only of striking
+expressions and not at all about the truth. "The flowing of the sap
+under the dull rind of the trees" is suggestive, but what suggestion
+is there in the remark, "May I ever be in as good spirits as a
+willow"? The mood of the scrub oak was more habitual with him.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau was in no sense an interpreter of nature; he did not draw out
+its meanings or seize upon and develop its more significant phases.
+Seldom does he relate what he sees or thinks to the universal human
+heart and mind. He has rare power of description, but is very limited
+in his power to translate the facts and movements of nature into human
+emotion. His passage on the northern lights, which Channing quotes
+from the Journals, is a good sample of his failure in this respect:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Now the fire in the north increases wonderfully, not
+shooting up so much as creeping along, like a fire on the
+mountains of the north seen afar in the night. The
+Hyperborean gods are burning brush, and it spread, and all
+the hoes in heaven couldn't stop it. It spread from west to
+east over the crescent hill. Like a vast fiery worm it lay
+across the northern sky, broken into many pieces; and each
+piece, with rainbow colors skirting it, strove to advance
+itself toward the east, worm-like, on its own annular
+muscles. It has spread into their choicest wood-lots. Now it
+shoots up like a single solitary watch-fire or burning bush,
+or where it ran up a pine tree like powder, and still it
+continues to gleam here and there like a fat stump in the
+burning, and is reflected in the water. And now I see the
+gods<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> by great exertions have got it under, and the stars
+have come out without fear, in peace.</p></div>
+
+<p>I get no impression of the mysterious almost supernatural character of
+the aurora from such a description in terms of a burning wood-lot or a
+hay-stack; it is no more like a conflagration than an apparition is
+like solid flesh and blood. Its wonderful, I almost said its
+spiritual, beauty, its sudden vanishings and returnings, its spectral,
+evanescent character&mdash;why, it startles and awes one as if it were the
+draperies around the throne of the Eternal. And then his mixed
+metaphor&mdash;the Hyperborean gods turned farmers and busy at burning
+brush, then a fiery worm, and then the burning wood-lots! But this is
+Thoreau&mdash;inspired with the heavenly elixir one moment, and drunk with
+the brew in his own cellar the next.</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+<p>Thoreau's faults as a writer are as obvious as his merits. Emerson hit
+upon one of them when he said, "The trick of his rhetoric is soon
+learned; it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought,
+its diametrical antagonist." He praises wild mountains and winter
+forests for their domestic air, snow and ice for their warmth, and so
+on. (Yet Emerson in one of his poems makes frost burn and fire
+freeze.) One frequently comes upon such sentences as these: "If I were
+sadder, I should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> be happier"; "The longer I have forgotten you, the
+more I remember you." It may give a moment's pleasure when a writer
+takes two opposites and rubs their ears together in that way, but one
+may easily get too much of it. Words really mean nothing when used in
+such a manner. When Emerson told Channing that if he (Emerson) could
+write as well as he did, he would write a great deal better, one
+readily sees what he means. And when Thoreau says of one of his
+callers, "I like his looks and the sound of his silence," the
+contradiction pleases one. But when he tells his friend that hate is
+the substratum of his love for him, words seem to have lost their
+meaning. Now and then he is guilty of sheer bragging, as when he says,
+"I would not go around the corner to see the world blow up."</p>
+
+<p>He often defies all our sense of fitness and proportion by the degree
+in which he magnifies the little and belittles the big. He says of the
+singing of a cricket which he heard under the border of some rock on
+the hillside one mid-May day, that it "makes the finest singing of
+birds outward and insignificant." "It is not so wildly melodious, but
+it is wiser and more mature than that of the wood thrush." His forced
+and meaningless analogies come out in such a comparison as this: "Most
+poems, like the fruits, are sweetest toward the blossom end." Which
+<i>is</i> the blossom end of a poem?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thoreau advised one of his correspondents when he made garden to plant
+some Giant Regrets&mdash;they were good for sauce. It is certain that he
+himself planted some Giant Exaggerations and had a good yield. His
+exaggeration was deliberate. "Walden" is from first to last a most
+delightful sample of his talent. He belittles everything that goes on
+in the world outside his bean-field. Business, politics, institutions,
+governments, wars and rumors of wars, were not so much to him as the
+humming of a mosquito in his hut at Walden: "I am as much affected by
+the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour
+through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door
+and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.
+It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air,
+singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical
+about it." One wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly buzzing
+on the pane.</p>
+
+<p>He made Walden Pond famous because he made it the center of the
+universe and found life rich and full without many of the things that
+others deem necessary. There is a stream of pilgrims to Walden at all
+seasons, curious to see where so much came out of so little&mdash;where a
+man had lived who preferred poverty to riches, and solitude to
+society, who boasted that he could do without the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span> post office, the
+newspapers, the telegraph, and who had little use for the railroad,
+though he thought mankind had become a little more punctual since its
+invention.</p>
+
+<p>Another conspicuous fault as a writer is his frequent use of false
+analogies, or his comparison of things which have no ground of
+relationship, as when he says: "A day passed in the society of those
+Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not
+be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines, and the
+fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." The word "wit" has no meaning when
+thus used. Or again where he says: "All great enterprises are
+self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his
+poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it
+makes." Was there ever a more inept and untruthful comparison? To find
+any ground of comparison between the two things he compared, he must
+make his poet sustain his body by the scraps and lines of his poem
+which he rejects, or else the steam planing-mill consume its finished
+product.</p>
+
+<p>"Let all things give way to the impulse of expression," he says, and
+he assuredly practiced what he had preached.</p>
+
+<p>One of his tricks of self-justification was to compare himself with
+inanimate objects, which is usually as inept as to compare colors with
+sounds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> or perfumes: "My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too
+cold," he writes, "but each thing is warm enough of its kind. Is the
+stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and does not
+part with it during the night? Crystals, though they be of ice are not
+too cold to melt.... Crystal does not complain of crystal any more
+than the dove of its mate."</p>
+
+<p>He strikes the same false note when, in discussing the question of
+solitude at Walden he compares himself to the wild animals around him,
+and to inanimate objects, and says he was no more lonely than the
+loons on the pond, or than Walden itself: "I am no more lonely than a
+single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel,
+or a house-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill
+Brook, or a weather-cock, or the North Star, or the South Wind, or an
+April Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in a new house."
+Did he imagine that any of these things were ever lonely? Man does get
+lonely, but Mill Brook and the North Star probably do not.</p>
+
+<p>If he sees anything unusual in nature, like galls on trees and plants,
+he must needs draw some moral from it, usually at the expense of the
+truth. For instance, he implies that the beauty of the oak galls is
+something that was meant to bloom in the flower, that the galls are
+the scarlet sins of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> the tree, the tree's Ode to Dejection, yet he
+must have known that they are the work of an insect and are as healthy
+a growth as is the regular leaf. The insect gives the magical touch
+that transforms the leaf into a nursery for its young. Why deceive
+ourselves by believing that fiction is more interesting than fact? But
+Thoreau is full of this sort of thing; he must have his analogy, true
+or false.</p>
+
+<p>He says that when a certain philosophical neighbor came to visit him
+in his hut at Walden, their discourse expanded and racked the little
+house: "I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was
+above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its
+seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to
+stop the consequent leak&mdash;but I had enough of that kind of oakum
+already picked." At the beginning of the paragraph he says that he and
+his philosopher sat down each with "some shingles of thoughts well
+dried," which they whittled, trying their knives and admiring the
+clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. In a twinkling the three
+shingles of thought are transformed into fishes of thought in a stream
+into which the hermit and the philosopher gently and reverently wade,
+without scaring or disturbing them. Then, presto! the fish become a
+force, like the pressure of a tornado that nearly wrecks his cabin!
+Surely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> this is tipsy rhetoric, and the work that can stand much of
+it, as "Walden" does, has a plus vitality that is rarely equaled.</p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+<p>In "Walden" Thoreau, in playfully naming his various occupations,
+says, "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
+circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of
+my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my
+labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own
+reward." If he were to come back now, he would, I think, open his eyes
+in astonishment, perhaps with irritation, to see the whole bulk of
+them at last in print.</p>
+
+<p>His Journal was the repository of all his writings, and was drawn upon
+during his lifetime for all the material he printed in books and
+contributed to the magazines. The fourteen volumes, I venture to say,
+form a record of the most minute and painstaking details of what one
+man saw and heard on his walks in field and wood, in a single
+township, that can be found in any literature.</p>
+
+<p>It seems as though a man who keeps a Journal soon becomes its victim;
+at least that seems to have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for
+that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it was like a hungry,
+omnivorous monster that con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>stantly called for more. He transcribed to
+its pages from the books he read, he filled it with interminable
+accounts of the commonplace things he saw in his walks, tedious and
+minute descriptions of everything in wood, field, and swamp. There are
+whole pages of the Latin names of the common weeds and flowers. Often
+he could not wait till he got home to write out his notes. He walked
+by day and night, in cold and heat, in storm and sunshine, all for his
+Journal. All was fish that came to that net; nothing was too
+insignificant to go in. He did not stop to make literature of it, or
+did not try, and it is rarely the raw material of literature. Its
+human interest is slight, its natural history interest slight also.
+For upwards of twenty-five years Thoreau seemed to have lived for this
+Journal. It swelled to many volumes. It is a drag-net that nothing
+escapes. The general reader reads Thoreau's Journal as he does the
+book of Nature, just to cull out the significant things here and
+there. The vast mass of the matter is merely negative, like the things
+that we disregard in our walk. Here and there we see a flower, or a
+tree, or a prospect, or a bird, that arrests attention, but how much
+we pass by or over without giving it a thought! And yet, just as the
+real nature-lover will scan eagerly the fine print in Nature's book,
+so will the student and enthusiast of Thoreau welcome all that is
+recorded in his Journals.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thoreau says that Channing in their walks together sometimes took out
+his notebook and tried to write as he did, but all in vain. "He soon
+puts it up again, or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of
+the landscape. Observing me still scribbling, he will say that he
+confines himself to the ideal, purely ideal remarks; he leaves the
+facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say, a little petulantly, 'I am
+universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite.'"
+The truth was Channing had no Journal calling, "More, more!" and was
+not so inordinately fond of composition. "I, too," says Thoreau,
+"would fain set down something beside facts. Facts should only be as
+the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology
+which I am writing." But only rarely are his facts significant, or
+capable of an ideal interpretation. Felicitous strokes like that in
+which he says, "No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep
+as the birch," are rare.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau evidently had a certain companionship with his Journal. It was
+like a home-staying body to whom he told everything on his return from
+a walk. He loved to write it up. He made notes of his observations as
+he went along, night or day. One time he forgot his notebook and so
+substituted a piece of birch-bark. He must bring back something
+gathered on the spot. He skimmed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> same country over and over; the
+cream he was after rose every day and all day, and in all seasons.</p>
+
+<p>He evidently loved to see the pages of his Journal sprinkled with the
+Latin names of the plants and animals that he saw in his walk. A
+common weed with a long Latin name acquired new dignity. Occasionally
+he fills whole pages with the scientific names of the common trees and
+plants. He loved also a sprinkling of Latin quotations and allusions
+to old and little known authors. The pride of scholarship was strong
+in him. Suggestions from what we call the heathen world seemed to
+accord with his Gospel of the Wild.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau loved to write as well as John Muir loved to talk. It was his
+ruling passion. He said time never passed so quickly as when he was
+writing. It seemed as if the clock had been set back. He evidently
+went to Walden for subject-matter for his pen; and the remarkable
+thing about it all is that he was always keyed up to the writing
+pitch. The fever of expression was always upon him. Day and night,
+winter and summer, it raged in his blood. He paused in his walks and
+wrote elaborately. The writing of his Journal must have taken as much
+time as his walking.</p>
+
+<p>Only Thoreau's constant and unquenchable thirst for intellectual
+activity, and to supply material for that all-devouring Journal, can,
+to me,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> account for his main occupation during the greater part of the
+last two years of his life, which consisted in traversing the woods
+and measuring the trees and stumps and counting their rings.
+Apparently not a stump escaped him&mdash;pine, oak, birch, chestnut, maple,
+old or new, in the pasture or in the woods; he must take its measure
+and know its age. He must get the girth of every tree he passed and
+some hint of all the local conditions that had influenced its growth.
+Over two hundred pages of his Journal are taken up with barren details
+of this kind. He cross-questions the stumps and trees as if searching
+for the clue to some important problem, but no such problem is
+disclosed. He ends where he begins. His vast mass of facts and figures
+was incapable of being generalized or systematized. His elaborate
+tables of figures, so carefully arranged, absolutely accurate, no
+doubt, are void of interest, because no valuable inferences can be
+drawn from them.</p>
+
+<p>"I have measured in all eight pitch pine stumps at the Tommy Wheeler
+hollow, sawed off within a foot of the ground. I measured the longest
+diameter and then at right angles with that, and took the average, and
+then selected the side of the stump on which the radius was of average
+length, and counted the number of rings in each inch, beginning at the
+center, thus:" And then follows a table of figures filling a page. "Of
+those eight,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span> average growth about one seventh of an inch per year.
+Calling the smallest number of rings in an inch in each tree one, the
+comparative slowness of growth of the inches is thus expressed." Then
+follows another carefully prepared table of figures. Before one is
+done with these pages one fairly suspects the writer is mad, the
+results are so useless, and so utterly fail to add to our knowledge of
+the woods. Would counting the leaves and branches in the forest, and
+making a pattern of each, and tabulating the whole mass of figures be
+any addition to our knowledge? I attribute the whole procedure, as I
+have said, to his uncontrollable intellectual activity, and the
+imaginary demands of this Journal, which continued to the end of his
+life. The very last pages of his Journal, a year previous to his
+death, are filled with minute accounts of the ordinary behavior of
+kittens, not one item novel or unusual, or throwing any light on the
+kitten. But it kept his mind busy, and added a page or two to the
+Journal.</p>
+
+<p>In his winter walks he usually carried a four-foot stick, marked in
+inches, and would measure the depth of the snow over large areas,
+every tenth step, and then construct pages of elaborate tables showing
+the variations according to locality, and then work out the
+average&mdash;an abnormal craving for exact but useless facts. Thirty-four
+measurements on Walden disclosed the important fact<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span> that the snow
+averaged five and one sixth inches deep. He analyzes a pensile nest
+which he found in the woods&mdash;doubtless one of the vireo's&mdash;and fills
+ten pages with a minute description of the different materials which
+it contained. Then he analyzes a yellow-bird's nest, filling two
+pages. That Journal shall not go hungry, even if there is nothing to
+give it but the dry material of a bird's nest.</p>
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+<p>The craving for literary expression in Thoreau was strong and
+constant, but, as he confesses, he could not always select a theme. "I
+am prepared not so much for contemplation as for forceful expression."
+No matter what the occasion, "forceful expression" was the aim. No
+meditation, or thinking, but sallies of the mind. All his paradoxes
+and false analogies and inconsistencies come from this craving for a
+forceful expression. He apparently brought to bear all the skill he
+possessed of this kind on all occasions. One must regard him, not as a
+great thinker, nor as a disinterested seeker after the truth, but as a
+master in the art of vigorous and picturesque expression. To startle,
+to wake up, to communicate to his reader a little wholesome shock, is
+his aim. Not the novelty and freshness of his subject-matter concerns
+him but the novelty and unhackneyed character of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span> literary style.
+That throughout the years a man should keep up the habit of walking,
+by night as well as by day, and bring such constant intellectual
+pressure to bear upon everything he saw, or heard, or felt, is
+remarkable. No evidence of relaxation, or of abandonment to the mere
+pleasure of the light and air and of green things growing, or of
+sauntering without thoughts of his Journal. He is as keyed up and
+strenuous in his commerce with the Celestial Empire as any tradesman
+in world goods that ever amassed a fortune. He sometimes wrote as he
+walked, and expanded and elaborated the same as in his study. On one
+occasion he dropped his pencil and could not find it, but he managed
+to complete the record. One night on his way to Conantum he speculates
+for nearly ten printed pages on the secret of being able to state a
+fact simply and adequately, or of making one's self the free organ of
+truth&mdash;a subtle and ingenious discussion with the habitual craving for
+forceful expression. In vain I try to put myself in the place of a man
+who goes forth into wild nature with malice prepense to give free
+swing to his passion for forcible expression. I suppose all
+nature-writers go forth on their walks or strolls to the fields and
+woods with minds open to all of Nature's genial influences and
+significant facts and incidents, but rarely, I think, with the
+strenuousness of Thoreau&mdash;grinding the grist as they go along.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thoreau compares himself to the bee that goes forth in quest of honey
+for the hive: "How to extract honey from the flower of the world. That
+is my everyday business. I am as busy as the bee about it. I ramble
+over all fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel
+myself heavy with honey and wax." To get material for his Journal was
+as much his business as it was the bee's to get honey for his comb. He
+apparently did not know that the bee does not get honey nor wax
+directly from the flowers, but only nectar, or sweet water. The bee,
+as I have often said, makes the honey and the wax after she gets home
+to the swarm. She puts the nectar through a process of her own, adds a
+drop of her own secretion to it, namely, formic acid, the water
+evaporates, and lo! the tang and pungency of honey!</p>
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+<p>There can be little doubt that in his practical daily life we may
+credit Thoreau with the friendliness and neighborliness that his
+friend Dr. Edward W. Emerson claims for him. In a recent letter to me,
+Dr. Emerson writes: "He carried the old New England
+undemonstrativeness very far. He was also, I believe, really shy,
+prospered only in monologue, except in a walk in the woods with one
+companion, and his difficulties increased to impossibility in a room
+full of people." Dr. Emerson ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>mits that Thoreau is himself to blame
+for giving his readers the impression that he held his kind in
+contempt, but says that in reality he had neighborliness, was dutiful
+to parents and sisters, showed courtesy to women and children and an
+open, friendly side to many a simple, uncultivated townsman.</p>
+
+<p>This practical helpfulness and friendliness in Thoreau's case seems to
+go along with the secret contempt he felt and expressed in his Journal
+toward his fellow townsmen. At one time he was chosen among the
+selectmen to perambulate the town lines&mdash;an old annual custom. One day
+they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the
+next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a
+week. Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. "A fatal coarseness is the
+result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been
+associating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I
+feel inexpressibly begrimed." How fragile his self-respect was! Yet he
+had friends among the surrounding farmers, whose society and
+conversation he greatly valued.</p>
+
+<p>That Thoreau gave the impression of being what country folk call a
+crusty person&mdash;curt and forbidding in manner&mdash;seems pretty well
+established. His friend Alcott says he was deficient in the human
+sentiments. Emerson, who, on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> whole, loved and admired him, says:
+"Thoreau sometimes appears only as a <i>gendarme</i>, good to knock down a
+cockney with, but without that power to cheer and establish which
+makes the value of a friend." Again he says: "If I knew only Thoreau,
+I should think co&ouml;peration of good men impossible. Must we always talk
+for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
+Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the
+higher gifts,&mdash;the insight of the real, or from the real, and the
+moral rectitude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources
+of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after
+year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some
+weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper
+wasted." "It is curious," he again says, "that Thoreau goes to a house
+to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers
+it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any
+of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it,
+and when he has finished his report departs with precipitation."</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting in this connection to put along-side of these rather
+caustic criticisms a remark in kind recorded by Thoreau in his Journal
+concerning Emerson: "Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my
+time&mdash;nay, almost my iden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>tity. He, assuming a false opposition where
+there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind&mdash;told me what I
+knew&mdash;and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to
+oppose him."</p>
+
+<p>Evidently Concord philosophers were not always in concord.</p>
+
+<p>More characteristic of Emerson is the incident Thoreau relates of his
+driving his own calf, which had just come in with the cows, out of the
+yard, thinking it belonged to a drove that was then going by. From all
+accounts Emerson was as slow to recognize his own thoughts when Alcott
+and Channing aired them before him as he was to recognize his own
+calf.</p>
+
+<p>"I have got a load of great hardwood stumps," writes Thoreau, and
+then, as though following out a thought suggested by them, he adds:
+"For sympathy with my neighbors I might about as well live in China.
+They are to me barbarians with their committee works and
+gregariousness."</p>
+
+<p>Probably the stumps were from trees that grew on his neighbors' farms
+and were a gift to him. Let us hope the farmers did not deliver them
+to him free of charge. He complained that the thousand and one
+gentlemen that he met were all alike; he was not cheered by the hope
+of any rudeness from them: "A cross man, a coarse man, an eccentric
+man, a silent man who does not drill well&mdash;of him there is some hope,"
+he declares.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> Herein we get a glimpse of the Thoreau ideal which led
+his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked the human sentiment. He
+may or may not have been a "cross man," but he certainly did not
+"drill well," for which his readers have reason to be thankful.
+Although Thoreau upholds the cross and the coarse man, one would
+really like to know with what grace he would have put up with
+gratuitous discourtesy or insult. I remember an entry in his Journal
+in which he tells of feeling a little cheapened when a neighbor asked
+him to take some handbills and leave them at a certain place as he
+passed on his walk.</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of the piquancy and novelty in Thoreau come from the
+unexpected turn he gives to things, upsetting all our preconceived
+notions. His trick of exaggeration he rather brags of: "Expect no
+trivial truth from me," he says, "unless I am on the witness stand."
+He even exaggerates his own tendency to exaggeration. It is all a part
+of his scheme to startle and wake people up. He exaggerates his likes,
+and he exaggerates his dislikes, and he exaggerates his indifference.
+It is a way he has of bragging. The moment he puts pen to paper the
+imp of exaggeration seizes it. He lived to see the beginning of the
+Civil War, and in a letter to a friend expressed his indifference in
+regard to Fort Sumter and "Old Abe," and all that, yet Mr. Sanborn
+says he was as zealous about the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span> war as any soldier. The John Brown
+tragedy made him sick, and the war so worked upon his feelings that in
+his failing state of health he said he could never get well while it
+lasted. His passion for Nature and the wild carried him to the extent
+of looking with suspicion, if not with positive dislike, upon all of
+man's doings and institutions. All civil and political and social
+organizations received scant justice at his hands. He instantly
+espoused the cause of John Brown and championed him in the most public
+manner because he (Brown) defied the iniquitous laws and fell a martyr
+to the cause of justice and right. If he had lived in our times, one
+would have expected him, in his letters to friends, to pooh-pooh the
+World War that has drenched Europe with blood, while in his heart he
+would probably have been as deeply moved about it as any of us were.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau must be a stoic, he must be an egotist, he must be illogical,
+whenever he puts pen to paper. This does not mean that he was a
+hypocrite, but it means that on his practical human side he did not
+differ so much from the rest of us, but that in his mental and
+spiritual life he pursued ideal ends with a seriousness that few of us
+are equal to. He loved to take an air-line. In his trips about the
+country to visit distant parts, he usually took the roads and paths or
+means of conveyance that other persons took, but now and then he
+would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> lay down his ruler on the map, draw a straight line to the
+point he proposed to visit, and follow that, going through the meadows
+and gardens and door-yards of the owners of the property in his line
+of march. There is a tradition that he and Channing once went through
+a house where the front and back door stood open. In his mental
+flights and excursions he follows this plan almost entirely; the hard
+facts and experiences of life trouble him very little. He can always
+ignore them or sail serenely above them.</p>
+
+<p>How is one to reconcile such an expression as this with what his
+friends report of his actual life: "My countrymen are to me
+foreigners. I have but little more sympathy with them than with the
+mobs of India or China"? Or this about his Concord neighbors, as he
+looks down upon them from a near-by hill: "On whatever side I look
+off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have
+lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by
+grovelling, coarse, and low-minded men?&mdash;no scenery can redeem it.
+Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as
+men of a similar character." Tried by his ideal standards, his
+neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of course, found wanting,
+yet he went about among them helpful and sympathetic and enjoyed his
+life to the last gasp. These things reveal to us what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span> a gulf there
+may be between a man's actual life and the high altitudes in which he
+disports himself when he lets go his imagination.</p>
+
+<h3>IX</h3>
+<p>In his paper called "Life without Principle," his radical idealism
+comes out: To work for money, or for subsistence alone, is life
+without principle. A man must work for the love of the work. Get a man
+to work for you who is actuated by love for you or for the work alone.
+Find some one to beat your rugs and carpets and clean out your well,
+or weed your onion-patch, who is not influenced by any money
+consideration. This were ideal, indeed; this suggests paradise.
+Thoreau probably loved his lecturing, and his surveying, and his
+magazine writing, and the money these avocations brought him did not
+seem unworthy, but could the business and industrial world safely
+adopt that principle?</p>
+
+<p>So far as I understand him, we all live without principle when we do
+anything that goes against the grain, or for money, or for bread
+alone. "To have done anything by which you earned money is to have
+been truly idle or worse." "If you would get money as a writer or
+lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly."
+Yet his neighbor Emerson was in much demand as a lecturer, and earned
+a good deal of money in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> that way. Truly idealists like Thoreau are
+hard to satisfy. Agassiz said he could not afford to give his time to
+making money, but how many Agassiz are there in the world at any one
+time? Such a man as our own Edison is influenced very little by the
+commercial value of his inventions. This is as it should be, but only
+a small fraction of mankind do or can live to ideal ends. Those who
+work for love are certainly the lucky ones, and are exceptionally
+endowed. It is love of the sport that usually sends one a-fishing or
+a-hunting, and this gives it the sanction of the Gospel according to
+Thoreau. Bradford Torrey saw a man sitting on a log down in Florida
+who told him, when he asked about his occupation, that he had no time
+to work! It is to be hoped that Thoreau enjoyed his surveying, as he
+probably did, especially when it took him through sphagnum swamps or
+scrub-oak thickets or a tangle of briers and thorns. The more
+difficult the way, the more he could summon his philosophy. "You must
+get your living by loving." It is a hard saying, but it is a part of
+his gospel. But as he on one occasion worked seventy-six days
+surveying, for only one dollar a day, the money he received should not
+be laid up against him.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact we find Thoreau frequently engaging in manual
+labor to earn a little money. He relates in his Journal of 1857 that
+while he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> living in the woods he did various jobs about
+town&mdash;fence-building, painting, gardening, carpentering:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>One day a man came from the east edge of the town and said
+that he wanted to get me to brick up a fireplace, etc.,
+etc., for him. I told him that I was not a mason, but he
+knew that I had built my own house entirely and would not
+take no for an answer. So I went.</p>
+
+<p>It was three miles off, and I walked back and forth each
+day, arriving early and working as late as if I were living
+there. The man was gone away most of the time, but had left
+some sand dug up in his cow-yard for me to make mortar with.
+I bricked up a fireplace, papered a chamber, but my
+principal work was whitewashing ceilings. Some were so dirty
+that many coats would not conceal the dirt. In the kitchen I
+finally resorted to yellow-wash to cover the dirt. I took my
+meals there, sitting down with my employer (when he got
+home) and his hired men. I remember the awful condition of
+the sink, at which I washed one day, and when I came to look
+at what was called the towel I passed it by and wiped my
+hands on the air, and thereafter I resorted to the pump. I
+worked there hard three days, charging only a dollar a day.</p>
+
+<p>About the same time I also contracted to build a wood-shed
+of no mean size, for, I think, exactly six dollars, and
+cleared about half of it by a close calculation and swift
+working. The tenant wanted me to throw in a gutter and
+latch, but I carried off the board that was left and gave
+him no latch but a button. It stands yet,&mdash;behind the Kettle
+house. I broke up Johnny Kettle's old "trow," in which he
+kneaded his bread, for material. Going home with what nails
+were left in a flower [<i>sic!</i>] bucket on my arm, in a rain,
+I was about getting into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella
+frightened the horse, and he kicked at me over the fills,
+smashed the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on my back;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
+but while I lay on my back, his leg being caught under the
+shaft, I got up, to see him sprawling on the other side.
+This accident, the sudden bending of my body backwards,
+sprained my stomach so that I did not get quite strong there
+for several years, but had to give up some fence-building
+and other work which I had undertaken from time to time.</p>
+
+<p>I built the common slat fence for $1.50 per rod, or worked
+for $1.00 per day. I built six fences.</p></div>
+
+<p>These homely and laborious occupations show the dreamer and
+transcendentalist of Walden in a very interesting light. In his
+practical life he was a ready and resourceful man and could set his
+neighbors a good example, and no doubt give them good advice. But what
+fun he had with his correspondents when they wrote him for practical
+advice about the conduct of their lives! One of them had evidently
+been vexing his soul over the problem of Church and State: "Why not
+make a very large mud pie and bake it in the sun? Only put no Church
+nor State into it, nor upset any other pepper box that way. Dig out a
+woodchuck&mdash;for that has nothing to do with rotting institutions. Go
+ahead."</p>
+
+<p>Dear, old-fashioned Wilson Flagg, who wrote pleasantly, but rather
+tamely, about New England birds and seasons, could not profit much
+from Thoreau's criticism: "He wants stirring up with a pole. He should
+practice turning a series of summer-sets rapidly, or jump up and see
+how many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> times he can strike his feet together before coming down.
+Let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits
+on it as on a grindstone; in short, see how many ideas he can
+entertain at once."</p>
+
+<p>Expect no Poor Richard maxims or counsel from Thoreau. He would tell
+you to invest your savings in the bonds of the Celestial Empire, or
+plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. He says these are
+excellent for sauce. He encourages one of his correspondents with the
+statement that he "never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and
+rolled through a mud puddle; he comes out honor bright from behind
+every storm."</p>
+
+<h3>X</h3>
+<p>All Thoreau's apparent inconsistencies and contradictions come from
+his radical idealism. In all his judgments upon men and things, and
+upon himself, he is an uncompromising idealist. All fall short. Add
+his habit of exaggeration and you have him saying that the pigs in the
+street in New York (in 1843) are the most respectable part of the
+population. The pigs, I suppose, lived up to the pig standard, but the
+people did not live up to the best human standards. Wherever the ideal
+leads him, there he follows. After his brother John's death he said he
+did not wish ever to see John<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span> again, but only the ideal John&mdash;that
+other John of whom he was but the imperfect representative. Yet the
+loss of the real John was a great blow to him, probably the severest
+in his life. But he never allows himself to go on record as showing
+any human weakness.</p>
+
+<p>"Comparatively," he says, "we can excuse any offense against the
+heart, but not against the imagination." Thoreau probably lived in his
+heart as much as most other persons, but his peculiar gospel is the
+work of his imagination. He could turn his idealism to practical
+account. A man who had been camping with him told me that on such
+expeditions he carried a small piece of cake carefully wrapped up in
+his pocket and that after he had eaten his dinner he would take a
+small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed to do the rest.</p>
+
+<p>The most unpromising subject would often kindle the imagination of
+Thoreau. His imagination fairly runs riot over poor Bill Wheeler, a
+cripple and a sot who stumped along on two clumps for feet, and who
+earned his grog by doing chores here and there. One day Thoreau found
+him asleep in the woods in a low shelter which consisted of meadow hay
+cast over a rude frame. It was a rare find to Thoreau. A man who could
+turn his back upon the town and civilization like that must be some
+great philosopher, greater than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span> Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps
+"from a deep principle," "simplifying life, returning to nature,"
+having put off many things,&mdash;"luxuries, comforts, human society, even
+his feet,&mdash;wrestling with his thoughts." He outdid himself. He
+out-Thoreaued Thoreau: "Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk
+he indulges, in thought, only in triumphant satires on men? [More
+severe than those of the Walden hermit?] I was not sure for a moment
+but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the
+philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous
+point of view&mdash;" with much more to the same effect.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and
+comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and
+austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this
+besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to
+contemplate.</p>
+
+<p>One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender human emotions in
+Thoreau, his stoical indifference is so habitual with him: "I laughed
+at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic
+story." And he excuses himself by saying, "It is not I, but Nature in
+me, which was stronger than I."</p>
+
+<p>It was hard for Thoreau to get interested in young women. He once went
+to an evening party<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> of thirty or forty of them, "in a small room,
+warm and noisy." He was introduced to two of them, but could not hear
+what they said, there was such a cackling. He concludes by saying:
+"The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever
+tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure
+whether they are there or not."</p>
+
+<h3>XI</h3>
+<p>As a philosopher or expositor and interpreter of a principle, Thoreau
+is often simply grotesque. His passion for strong and striking figures
+usually gets the best of him. In discussing the relation that exists
+between the speaker or lecturer and his audience he says, "The
+lecturer will read best those parts of his lecture which are best
+heard," as if the reading did not precede the hearing! Then comes this
+grotesque analogy: "I saw some men unloading molasses-hogsheads from a
+truck at a depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined plane. The
+truckman stood behind and shoved, after putting a couple of ropes, one
+round each end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the depot
+steadily pulled at the ropes. The first man was the lecturer, the last
+was the audience." I suppose the hogshead stands for the big thoughts
+of the speaker which he cannot manage at all without the active
+co&ouml;peration of the audience. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span> truth is, people assemble in a
+lecture hall in a passive but expectant frame of mind. They are ready
+to be pleased or displeased. They are there like an instrument to be
+played upon by the orator. He may work his will with them. Without
+their sympathy his success will not be great, but the triumph of his
+art is to win their sympathy. Those who went to scoff when the Great
+Preacher spoke, remained to pray. No man could speak as eloquently to
+empty seats, or to a dummy audience, as to a hall filled with
+intelligent people, yet Thoreau's ropes and hogsheads and pulling and
+pushing truckmen absurdly misrepresent the true relation that exists
+between a speaker and his hearers. Of course a speaker finds it uphill
+work if his audience is not with him, but that it is not with him is
+usually his own fault.</p>
+
+<p>Thoreau's merits as a man and a writer are so many and so great that I
+have not hesitated to make much of his defects. Indeed, I have with
+malice aforethought ransacked his works to find them. But after they
+are all charged up against him, the balance that remains on the credit
+side of the account is so great that they do not disturb us.</p>
+
+<p>There has been but one Thoreau, and we should devoutly thank the gods
+of New England for the precious gift. Thoreau's work lives and will
+continue to live because, in the first place, the world loves a writer
+who can flout it and turn his back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> upon it and yet make good; and
+again because the books which he gave to the world have many and very
+high literary and ethical values. They are fresh, original, and
+stimulating. He drew a gospel out of the wild; he brought messages
+from the wood gods to men; he made a lonely pond in Massachusetts a
+fountain of the purest and most elevating thoughts, and, with his
+great neighbor Emerson, added new luster to a town over which the muse
+of our colonial history had long loved to dwell.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN</h3>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p>It is never safe to question Darwin's facts, but it is always safe to
+question any man's theories. It is with Darwin's theories that I am
+mainly concerned here. He has already been shorn of his selection
+doctrines as completely as Samson was shorn of his locks, but there
+are other phases of his life and teachings that invite discussion.</p>
+
+<p>The study of Darwin's works begets such an affection for the man, for
+the elements of character displayed on every page, that one is slow in
+convincing one's self that anything is wrong with his theories. There
+is danger that one's critical judgment will be blinded by one's
+partiality for the man.</p>
+
+<p>For the band of brilliant men who surrounded him and championed his
+doctrines&mdash;Spencer, Huxley, Lyall, Hooker, and others&mdash;one feels
+nothing more personal than admiration; unless the eloquent and
+chivalrous Huxley&mdash;the knight in shining armor of the Darwinian
+theory&mdash;inspires a warmer feeling. Darwin himself almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> disarms one
+by his amazing candor and his utter self-abnegation. The question
+always paramount in his mind is, what is the truth about this matter?
+What fact have you got for me, he seems to say, that will upset my
+conclusion? If you have one, that is just what I am looking for.</p>
+
+<p>Could we have been permitted to gaze upon the earth in the middle
+geologic period, in Jurassic or Triassic times, we should have seen it
+teeming with huge, uncouth, gigantic forms of animal life, in the sea,
+on the land, and in the air, and with many lesser forms, but with no
+sign of man anywhere; ransack the earth from pole to pole and there
+was no sign or suggestion, so far as we could have seen, of a human
+being.</p>
+
+<p>Come down the stream of time several millions of years&mdash;to our own
+geologic age&mdash;and we find the earth swarming with the human species
+like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found
+in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the
+earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they
+come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that a hand reached down
+from heaven, or up from below, and placed them there. There is no
+alternative but to believe that in some way they arose out of the
+antecedent animal life of the globe; in other words that man is the
+result of the process of evolution, and that all other existing forms
+of life,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span> vegetable and animal, are a product of the same movement.</p>
+
+<p>To explain how this came about, what factors and forces entered into
+the transformation, is the task that Darwin set himself. It was a
+mighty task, and whether or not his solution of the problem stands the
+test of time, we must yet bow in reverence before one of the greatest
+of natural philosophers; for even to have conceived this problem thus
+clearly, and to have placed it in intelligible form before men's
+minds, is a great achievement.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin was as far from being as sure of the truth of Darwinism as many
+of his disciples were, and still are. He said in 1860, in a letter to
+one of his American correspondents, "I have never for a moment doubted
+that, though I cannot see my errors, much of my book ["The Origin of
+Species"] will be proved erroneous." Again he said, in 1862, "I look
+at it as absolutely certain that very much in the 'Origin' will be
+proved rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand."</p>
+
+<p>Its framework is the theory of Evolution, which is very sure to stand.
+In its inception his theory is half-miracle and half-fact. He assumes
+that in the beginning (as if there ever was or could be a "beginning,"
+in that sense) God created a few forms, animal and vegetable, and then
+left it to the gods of Evolution, the chief of which is Natural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+Selection, to do the rest. While Darwin would not admit any
+predetermining factors in Evolution, or that any innate tendency to
+progressive development existed, he said he could not look upon the
+world of living things as the result of chance. Yet in fortuitous, or
+chance, variation he saw one of the chief factors of Evolution.</p>
+
+<p>The world of Chance into which Darwinism delivers us&mdash;what can the
+thoughtful mind make of it?</p>
+
+<p>That life with all its myriad forms is the result of chance is,
+according to Professor Osborn, a biological dogma. He everywhere uses
+the word "chance" as opposed to law, or to the sequence of cause and
+effect. This, it seems to me, is a misuse of the term. Is law, in this
+sense, ever suspended or annulled? If one chances to fall off his
+horse or his house, is it not gravity that pulls him down? Are not the
+laws of energy everywhere operative in all movements of matter in the
+material world? Chance is not opposed to law, but to design. Anything
+that befalls us that was not designed is a matter of chance. The
+fortuitous enters largely into all human life. If I carelessly toss a
+stone across the road, it is a matter of chance just where it will
+fall, but its course is not lawless. Does not gravity act upon it?
+does not the resistance of the air act upon it? does not the muscular
+force of my arm act upon it? and does not this complex of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span> physical
+forces determine the precise spot where the stone shall fall? If, in
+its fall, it were to hit a bird or a mouse or a flower, that would be
+a matter of chance, so far as my will was concerned. Is not a meteoric
+stone falling out of space acted upon by similar forces, which
+determine where it shall strike the earth? In this case, we must
+substitute for the energy of my arm the cosmic energy that gives the
+primal impetus to all heavenly bodies. If the falling a&euml;rolite were to
+hit a person or a house, we should say it was a matter of chance,
+because it was not planned or designed. But when the shells of the
+long-range guns hit their invisible target or the bombs from the
+airplanes hit their marks, chance plays a part, because all the
+factors that enter into the problem are not and cannot be on the
+instant accurately measured. The collision of two heavenly bodies in
+the depth of space, which does happen, is, from our point of view, a
+matter of chance, although governed by inexorable law.</p>
+
+<p>The forms of inanimate objects&mdash;rocks, hills, rivers, lakes&mdash;are
+matters of chance, since they serve no purpose: any other form would
+be as fit; but the forms of living things are always purposeful. Is it
+possible to believe that the human body, with all its complicated
+mechanism, its many wonderful organs of secretion and excretion and
+assimilation, is any more matter of chance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span> than a watch or a
+phonograph is? Though what agent to substitute for the word "chance,"
+I confess I do not know. The short cut to an omnipotent Creator
+sitting apart from the thing created will not satisfy the naturalist.
+And to make energy itself creative, as Professor Osborn does, is only
+to substitute one god for another. I can no more think of the course
+of organic evolution as being accidental in the Darwinian sense, than
+I can think of the evolution of the printing-press or the a&euml;roplane as
+being accidental, although chance has played its part. Can we think of
+the first little horse of which we have any record, the eohippus of
+three or four millions of years ago, as evolving by accidental
+variations into the horse of our time, without presupposing an equine
+impulse to development? As well might we trust our ships to the winds
+and waves with the expectation that they will reach their several
+ports.</p>
+
+<p>Are we to believe that we live in an entirely mechanical and
+fortuitous world&mdash;a world which has no interior, which is only a maze
+of acting, reacting, and interacting of blind physical forces?
+According to the chance theory, the struggle of a living body to exist
+does not differ from the vicissitudes of, say, water seeking an
+equilibrium, or heat a uniform temperature.</p>
+
+<p>Chance has played an important part in human history, and in all
+life-history&mdash;often, no doubt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span> the main part&mdash;since history began. It
+was by chance that Columbus discovered America; he simply blundered
+upon it. He had set out on his voyage with something quite different
+in view. But his ship, and the crew, and the voyage itself, were not
+matters of chance but of purpose.</p>
+
+<p>According to the selectionists' theory, chance gave the bird its
+wings, the fish its fins, the porcupine its quills, the skunk its
+fetid secretion, the cuttlefish its ink, the swordfish its sword, the
+electric eel its powerful battery; it gave the giraffe its long neck,
+the camel its hump, the horse its hoof, the ruminants their horns and
+double stomach, and so on. According to Weismann, it gave us our eyes,
+our ears, our hands with the fingers and opposing thumb, it gave us
+all the complicated and wonderful organs of our bodies, and all their
+circulation, respiration, digestion, assimilation, secretion,
+excretion, reproduction. All we are, or can be, the selectionist
+credits to Natural Selection.</p>
+
+<p>Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, with all its marvelous
+powers and adaptations, as the result of what we call chance or
+Natural Selection. Well may Darwin have said that the eye made him
+shudder when he tried to account for it by Natural Selection. Why, its
+adaptations in one respect alone, minor though they be, are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span> enough to
+stagger any number of selectionists. I refer to the rows of peculiar
+glands that secrete an oily substance, differing in chemical
+composition from any other secretion, a secretion which keeps the
+eyelids from sticking together in sleep. "Behavior as lawless as
+snowflakes," says Whitman&mdash;a phrase which probably stuck to him from
+Rousseau; but are snowflakes and raindrops lawless? To us creatures of
+purpose, they are so because the order of their falling is haphazard.
+They obey their own laws. Again we see chance working inside of law.</p>
+
+<p>When the sower scatters the seed-grains from his hand, he does not and
+cannot determine the point of soil upon which any of them shall fall,
+but there is design in his being there and in sowing the seed.
+Astronomy is an exact science, biology is not. The celestial events
+always happen on time. The astronomers can tell us to the fraction of
+a second when the eclipses of the sun and moon and the transit of the
+inferior planets across the sun's disk will take place. They know and
+have measured all the forces that bring them about. Now, if we knew
+with the same mathematical precision all the elements that enter into
+the complex of forces which shapes our lives, could we forecast the
+future with the same accuracy with which the astronomers forecast the
+movements of the orbs? or are there incommensurable factors in life?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p>How are we to reconcile the obvious hit-and-miss method of Nature with
+the reign of law, or with a world of design? Consider the seeds of a
+plant or a tree, as sown by the wind. It is a matter of chance where
+they alight; it is hit or miss with them always. Yet the seeds, say,
+of the cat-tail flag always find the wet or the marshy places. If they
+had a topographical map of the country and a hundred eyes they could
+not succeed better. Of course, there are vastly more failures than
+successes with them, but one success in ten thousand trials is enough.
+They go to all points of the compass with the wind, and sooner or
+later hit the mark. Chance decides where the seed shall fall, but it
+was not chance that gave wings to this and other seeds. The hooks and
+wings and springs and parachutes that wind-sown seeds possess are not
+matters of chance: they all show design. So here is design working in
+a hit-and-miss world.</p>
+
+<p>There are chance details in any general plan. The general forms which
+a maple or an oak or an elm takes in the forest or in the field are
+fixed, but many of the details are quite accidental. All the
+individual trees of a species have a general resemblance, but one
+differs from another in the number and exact distribution of the
+branches, and in many other ways. We cannot solve the fundamental
+problems of biology by addition and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span> subtraction. He who sees nothing
+transcendent and mysterious in the universe does not see deeply; he
+lacks that vision without which the people perish. All organic and
+structural changes are adaptive from the first; they do not need
+natural selection to whip them into shape. All it can do is to serve
+as a weeding-out process.</p>
+
+<p>Acquired characters are not inherited, but those organic changes which
+are the result of the indwelling impulse of development are inherited.
+So dominant and fundamental are the results of this impulse that
+cross-breeding does not wipe them out.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p>While I cannot believe that we live in a world of chance, any more
+than Darwin could, yet I feel that I am as free from any teleological
+taint as he was. The world-old notion of a creator and director,
+sitting apart from the universe and shaping and controlling all its
+affairs, a magnified king or emperor, finds no lodgment in my mind.
+Kings and despots have had their day, both in heaven and on earth. The
+universe is a democracy. The Whole directs the Whole. Every particle
+plays its own part, and yet the universe is a unit as much as is the
+human body, with all its myriad of individual cells, and all its many
+separate organs functioning in harmony. And the mind I see in nature
+is just as obvious as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span> mind I see in myself, and subject to the
+same imperfections and limitations.</p>
+
+<p>In following Lamarck I am not disturbed by the bogey of teleology, or
+the ghost of mysticism. I am persuaded that there is something
+immanent in the universe, pervading every atom and molecule in it,
+that knows what it wants&mdash;a Cosmic Mind or Intelligence that we must
+take account of if we would make any headway in trying to understand
+the world in which we find ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>When we deny God it is always in behalf of some other god. We are
+compelled to recognize something not ourselves from which we proceed,
+and in which we live and move and have our being, call it energy, or
+will, or Jehovah, or Ancient of Days. We cannot deny it because we are
+a part of it. As well might the fountain deny the sea or the cloud.
+Each of us is a fraction of the universal Eternal Intelligence. Is it
+unscientific to believe that our own minds have their counterpart or
+their origin in the nature of which we form a part? Is our own
+intelligence all there is of mind-manifestation in the universe? Where
+did we get this divine gift? Did we take all there was of it?
+Certainly we did not ourselves invent it. It would require
+considerable wit to do that. Mind is immanent in nature, but in man
+alone it becomes self-conscious. Wherever there is adaptation of means
+to an end, there is mind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yet we use the terms "guidance," "predetermination," and so on, at the
+risk of being misunderstood. All such terms are charged with the
+meaning that our daily lives impart to them and, when applied to the
+processes of the Cosmos, are only half-truths. From our experience
+with objects and forces in this world, the earth ought to rest upon
+something, and that object upon something, and the moon ought to fall
+upon the earth, and the earth fall into the sun, and, in fact, the
+whole sidereal system ought to collapse. But it does not, and will
+not. As nearly as we can put it into words, the whole visible universe
+floats in a boundless and fathomless sea of energy; and that is all we
+know about it.</p>
+
+<p>If chance brought us here and endowed us with our bodies and our
+minds, and keeps us here, and adapts us to the world in which we live,
+is not Chance a good enough god for any of us? Or if Natural Selection
+did it, or orthogenesis or epigenesis, or any other genesis, have we
+not in any of these found a god equal to the occasion? Darwin goes
+wrong, if I may be allowed to say so, when he describes or
+characterizes the activities of Nature in terms of our own activities.
+Man's selection affords no clue to Nature's selection, and the best to
+man is not the best to Nature. For instance, she is concerned with
+color and form only so far as they have survival value. We are
+concerned more with intrinsic values.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Man," says Darwin, "selects only for his own good; Nature only for
+the good of the being which she tends." But Nature's good is of
+another order than man's: it is the good of all. Nature aims at a
+general good, man at a particular good to himself. Man waters his
+garden; Nature sends the rain broadcast upon the just and the unjust,
+upon the sea as upon the land. Man directs and controls his planting
+and his harvesting along specific lines: he selects his seed and
+prepares his soil; Nature has no system in this respect: she trusts
+her seeds to the winds and the waters, and to beasts and birds, and
+her harvest rarely fails.</p>
+
+<p>Nature's methods, we say, are blind, haphazard; the wind blows where
+it listeth, and the seeds fall where the winds and waters carry them;
+the frosts blight this section and spare that; the rains flood the
+country in the West and the drought burns up the vegetation in the
+East. And yet we survive and prosper. Nature averages up well. We see
+nothing like purpose or will in her total scheme of things, yet inside
+her hit-and-miss methods, her storms and tornadoes and earthquakes and
+distempers, we see a fundamental benefaction. If it is not good-will,
+it amounts to the same thing. Our fathers saw special providences, but
+we see only unchangeable laws. To compare Nature's selection with
+man's selection is like arguing from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span> man's art to Nature's art.
+Nature has no art, no architecture, no music. Her temples, as the
+poets tell us, are the woods, her harps the branches of the trees, her
+minstrels the birds and insects, her gardens the fields and
+waysides&mdash;all safe comparisons for purposes of literature, but not for
+purposes of science.</p>
+
+<p>Man alone selects, or works by a definite method. Might we not as well
+say that Nature ploughs and plants and trims and harvests? We pick out
+our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our
+purpose. We go straight to our object, with as little delay and waste
+as possible. Not so Nature. Her course is always a round-about one.
+Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Our choice selection of
+rich milkers, prolific poultry, or heavy-fleeced sheep is with her
+quickly sacrificed for the qualities of strength and cunning and
+speed, as these alone have survival value. Man wants specific results
+at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled
+only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of
+her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome.</p>
+
+<p>What is called Darwinism is entirely an anthropomorphic view of
+Nature&mdash;Nature humanized and doing as man does. What is called Natural
+Selection is man's selection read into animate nature. We see in
+nature what we have to call<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span> intelligence&mdash;the adaptation of means to
+ends. We see purpose in all living things, but not in the same sense
+in non-living things. The purpose is not in the light, but in the eye;
+in the ear, but not in the sound; in the lungs, and not in the air; in
+the stomach, and not in the food; in the various organs of the body,
+and not in the forces that surround and act upon it. We cannot say
+that the purpose of the clouds is to bring rain, or of the sun to give
+light and warmth, in the sense that we can say it is the purpose of
+the eyelid to protect the eye, of the teeth to masticate the food, or
+of the varnish upon the leaves to protect the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>The world was not made for us, but we are here because the world was
+made as it is. We are the secondary fact and not the primary. Nature
+is non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scientific, though it is
+from her that we get our ideas of all these things. All parts and
+organs of living bodies have, or have had, a purpose. Nature is blind,
+but she knows what she wants and she gets it. She is blind, I say,
+because she is all eyes, and sees through the buds of her trees and
+the rootlets of her plants as well as by the optic nerves in her
+animals. And, though I believe that the accumulation of variations is
+the key to new species, yet this accumulation is not based upon
+outward utility but upon an innate tendency to development&mdash;the push
+of life, or creative evolution, as Bergson<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span> names it; not primarily
+because the variations are advantages, but because the formation of a
+new species is such a slow process, stretches over such a period of
+geologic time, that the slight variations from generation to
+generation could have no survival value. The primary factor is the
+inherent tendency to development. The origin of species is on a scale
+of time of enormous magnitude. What takes place among our domestic
+animals of a summer day is by no means a safe guide as to what befell
+their ancestors in the abysses of geologic time. It is true that
+Nature may be read in the little as well as in the big,&mdash;<i>Natura in
+minimis existat</i>,&mdash;in the gnat as well as in the elephant; but she
+cannot be read in our yearly calendars as she can in the calendars of
+the geologic strata. Species go out and species come in; the book of
+natural revelation opens and closes at chance places, and rarely do we
+get a continuous record&mdash;in no other case more clearly than in that of
+the horse.</p>
+
+<p>The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed animal in Eocene
+times, millions of years ago, through all the intermediate forms of
+four-toed and three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature of our
+own day. Amid all the hazards and delays of that vast stretch of time,
+one may say, the horse-impulse never faltered. The survival value of
+the slight gains in size and strength from millennium<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span> to millennium
+could have played no part. It was the indwelling necessity toward
+development that determined the issue. This assertion does not deliver
+us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that
+ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little
+eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is
+potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever
+element of mystery may enter into the problem.</p>
+
+<p>In fields where speed wins, the fleetest are the fittest. In fields
+where strength wins, the strongest are the fittest. In fields where
+sense-acuteness wins, the keenest of eye, ears, and nose are the
+fittest.</p>
+
+<p>When we come to the race of man, the fittest to survive, from our
+moral and intellectual point of view, is not always the best. The
+lower orders of humanity are usually better fitted to survive than the
+higher orders&mdash;they are much more prolific and adaptive. The tares are
+better fitted to survive than the wheat. Every man's hand is against
+the weeds, and every man's hand gives a lift to the corn and the
+wheat, but the weeds do not fail. There is nothing like original sin
+to keep a man or a plant going. Emerson's gardener was probably better
+fitted to survive than Emerson; Newton's butler than Newton himself.</p>
+
+<p>Most naturalists will side with Darwin in re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>jecting the idea of Asa
+Gray, that the stream of variation has been guided by a higher power,
+unless they think of the will of this power as inherent in every
+molecule of matter; but guidance in the usual theological sense is not
+to be thought of; the principle of guidance cannot be separated from
+the thing guided. It recalls a parable of Charles Kingsley's which he
+related to Huxley. A heathen khan in Tartary was visited by a pair of
+proselytizing moollahs. The first moollah said, "O Khan, worship my
+god. He is so wise that he made all things!" Moollah Number Two said,
+"O Khan, worship my god. He is so wise that he makes all things make
+themselves!" Number Two won the day.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+<p>How often it turns out that a man's minor works outlive his major!
+This is true in both literature and science, but more often in the
+former than in the latter. Darwin furnishes a case in the field of
+science. He evidently looked upon his "Origin of Species" as his great
+contribution to biological science; but it is highly probable that his
+"Voyage of the Beagle" will outlast all his other books. The "Voyage"
+is of perennial interest and finds new readers in each generation. I
+find myself re-reading it every eight or ten years. I have lately read
+it for the fourth time. It is not an argument or a polemic; it is a
+personal narrative of a disin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>terested yet keen observer, and is
+always fresh and satisfying. For the first time we see a comparatively
+unknown country like South America through the eyes of a born and
+trained naturalist. It is the one book of his that makes a wide appeal
+and touches life and nature the most closely.</p>
+
+<p>We may say that Darwin was a Darwinian from the first,&mdash;a naturalist
+and a philosopher combined,&mdash;and was predisposed to look at animate
+nature in the way his works have since made us familiar with.</p>
+
+<p>In his trip on the Beagle he saw from the start with the eyes of a
+born evolutionist. In South America he saw the fossil remains of the
+Toxodon, and observed, "How wonderful are the different orders, at the
+present time so well separated, blended together in the different
+points of the structure of the Toxodon!" All forms of life attracted
+him. He looked into the brine-pans of Lymington and found that water
+with one quarter of a pound of salt to the pint was inhabited, and he
+was led to say: "Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+habitable! Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean ones hidden
+beneath volcanic mountains,&mdash;warm mineral springs,&mdash;the wide expanse
+and depth of the ocean,&mdash;the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even
+the surface of perpetual snow,&mdash;all support organic beings."</p>
+
+<p>He studies the parasitical habit of the cuckoo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span> and hits on an
+explanation of it. He speculates why the partridges and deer in South
+America are so tame.</p>
+
+<p>His "Voyage of the Beagle" alone would insure him lasting fame. It is
+a classic among scientific books of travel. Here is a traveler of a
+new kind: a natural-history voyager, a man bent on seeing and taking
+note of everything going on in nature about him, in the non-human, as
+well as in the human world. The minuteness of his observation and the
+significance of its subject-matter are a lesson to all observers.
+Darwin's interests are so varied and genuine. One sees in this volume
+the seed-bed of much of his subsequent work. He was quite a young man
+(twenty-four) when he made this voyage; he was ill more than half the
+time; he was as yet only an observer and appreciator of Nature, quite
+free from any theories about her ways and methods. He says that this
+was by far the most important event of his life and determined his
+whole career. His theory of descent was already latent in his mind, as
+is evinced by an observation he made about the relationship in South
+America between the extinct and the living forms. "This relationship,"
+he said, "will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the
+appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance
+from it, than any other class of facts."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He looked into the muddy waters of the sea off the coast of Chile, and
+found a curious new form of minute life&mdash;microscopic animals that
+exploded as they swam through the water. In South America he saw an
+intimate relationship between the extinct species of ant-eaters,
+armadillos, tapirs, peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and so on, and the
+living species of these animals; and he adds that the wonderful
+relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living
+would doubtless hereafter throw more light on the appearance of
+organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any
+other class of facts.</p>
+
+<p>His observation of the evidences of the rise and fall of thousands of
+feet of the earth along the Cordilleras leads him to make this rather
+startling statement: "Daily it is forced home on the mind of the
+geologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable
+as the level of the crust of the earth."</p>
+
+<p>There is now and then a twinkle of humor in Darwin's eyes, as when he
+says that in the high altitude of the Andes the inhabitants recommend
+onions for the "puna," or shortness of breath, but that he found
+nothing so good as fossil shells.</p>
+
+<p>Water boils at such a low temperature in the high Andes that potatoes
+will not cook if boiled all night. Darwin heard his guides discussing
+the cause. "They had come to the simple conclusion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> that 'the cursed
+pot' (which was a new one) did not choose to boil potatoes."</p>
+
+<p>In all Darwin's record we see that the book of nature, which ordinary
+travelers barely glance at, he opened and carefully perused.</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+<p>Natural Selection turns out to be of only secondary importance. It is
+not creative, but only confirmative. It is a weeding-out process; it
+is Nature's way of improving the stock. Its tendency is to make
+species more and more hardy and virile. The weak and insufficiently
+endowed among all forms tend to drop out. Life to all creatures is
+more or less a struggle, a struggle with the environment, with the
+inorganic forces,&mdash;storm, heat, cold, sterile land, and engulfing
+floods,&mdash;and it is a struggle with competing forms for food and
+shelter and a place in the sun. The strongest, the most amply endowed
+with what we call vitality or power to live, win. Species have come to
+be what they are through this process. Immunity from disease comes
+through this fight for life; and adaptability&mdash;through trial and
+struggle species adapt themselves, as do our own bodies, to new and
+severe conditions. The naturally weak fall by the wayside as in an
+army on a forced march.</p>
+
+<p>Every creature becomes the stronger by the opposition it overcomes.
+Natural Selection gives<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span> speed, where speed is the condition of
+safety, strength where strength is the condition, keenness and
+quickness of sense-perception where these are demanded. Natural
+Selection works upon these attributes and tends to perfect them. Any
+group of men or beasts or birds brought under any unusual strain from
+cold, hunger, labor, effort, will undergo a weeding-out process.
+Populate the land with more animal life than it can support, or with
+more vegetable forms than it can sustain, and a weeding-out process
+will begin. A fuller measure of vitality, or a certain hardiness and
+toughness, will enable some species to hold on longer than others,
+and, maybe, keep up the fight till the struggle lessens and victory is
+won.</p>
+
+<p>The flame of life is easily blown out in certain forms, and is very
+tenacious in others. How unequally the power to resist cold, for
+instance, seems to be distributed among plants and trees, and probably
+among animals! One spring an unseasonable cold snap in May (mercury
+28) killed or withered about one per cent of the leaves on the lilacs,
+and one tenth of one per cent of the leaves of our crab-apple tree. In
+the woods around Slabsides I observed that nearly half the plants of
+Solomon's-seal (<i>Polygonatum</i>) and false Solomon's-seal (<i>Smilacina</i>)
+were withered. The vital power, the power to live, seems stronger in
+some plants than in others of the same kind. I suppose this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> law holds
+throughout animate nature. When a strain of any kind comes, these
+weaker ones drop out. In reading the stories of Arctic explorers, I
+see this process going on among their dog-teams: some have greater
+power of endurance than others. A few are constantly dropping out or
+falling by the wayside. With an army on a forced march the same thing
+happens. In the struggle for existence the weak go to the wall. Of
+course the struggle among animals is at least a toughening process. It
+seems as if the old Indian legend, that the strength of the foe
+overcome passes into the victor, were true. But how a new species
+could arrive as the result of such struggle is past finding out.
+Variation with all forms of life is more or less constant, but it is
+around a given mean. Only those acquired characters are transmitted
+that arise from the needs of the organism.</p>
+
+<p>A vast number of changes in plants and animals are superficial and in
+no way vital. It is hard to find two leaves of the same tree that will
+exactly coincide in all their details; but a difference that was in
+some way a decided advantage would tend to be inherited and passed
+along. It is said that the rabbits in Australia have developed a
+longer and stronger nail on the first toe of each front foot, which
+aids them in climbing over the wire fences. The aye-aye has a
+specially adapted finger for extracting insects from their
+hiding-places. Un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>doubtedly such things are inherited. The snowshoes
+of the partridge and rabbit are inherited. The needs of the organism
+influence structure. The spines in the quills in the tails of
+woodpeckers, and in the brown creeper, are other cases in point. The
+nuthatch has no spines on its tail, because it can move in all
+directions, as well with head down as with head up. I have read of a
+serpent somewhere that feeds upon eggs. As the serpent has no lips or
+distendable cheeks, and as its mechanism of deglutition acts very
+slowly, an egg crushed in the mouth would be mostly spilled. So the
+eggs are swallowed whole; but in the throat they come in contact with
+sharp tooth-like spines, which are not teeth, but downward projections
+from the backbone, and which serve to break the shells of the eggs.
+Radical or vital variations are rare, and we do not witness them any
+more than we witness the birth of a new species. And that is all there
+is to Natural Selection. It is a name for a process of elimination
+which is constantly going on in animate nature all about us. It is in
+no sense creative, it originates nothing, but clinches and toughens
+existing forms.</p>
+
+<p>The mutation theory of De Vries is a much more convincing theory of
+the origin of species than is Darwin's Natural Selection. If things
+would only mutate a little oftener! But they seem very reluctant to do
+so. There does seem to have been some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> mutation among plants,&mdash;De
+Vries has discovered several such,&mdash;but in animal life where are the
+mutants? When or where has a new species originated in this way?
+Surely not during the historic period.</p>
+
+<p>Fluctuations are in all directions around a center&mdash;the mean is always
+returned to; but mutations, or the progressive steps in evolution, are
+divergent lines away from the center. Fluctuations are superficial and
+of little significance; but mutations, if they occur, involve
+deep-seated, fundamental factors, factors more or less responsive to
+the environment, but not called into being by it. Of the four factors
+in the Darwinian formula,&mdash;variation, heredity, the struggle, and
+natural selection,&mdash;variation is the most negligible; it furnishes an
+insufficient handle for selection to take hold of. Something more
+radical must lead the way to new species.</p>
+
+<p>As applied to species, the fittest to survive is a misleading term.
+All are fit to survive from the fact that they do survive. In a world
+where, as a rule, the race is to the swift and the battle to the
+strong, the slow and the frail also survive because they do not come
+in competition with the swift and the strong. Nature mothers all, and
+assigns to each its sphere.</p>
+
+<p>The Darwinians are hostile to Lamarck with his inner developing and
+perfecting principle, and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span> by the same token, to Aristotle, who is
+the father of the theory. They regard organic evolution as a purely
+mechanical process.</p>
+
+<p>Variation can work only upon a variable tendency&mdash;an inherent impulse
+to development. A rock, a hill, a stream, may change, but it is not
+variable in the biological sense: it can never become anything but a
+rock, a hill, a stream; but a flower, an egg, a seed, a plant, a baby,
+can. What I mean to say is that there must be the primordial tendency
+to development which Natural Selection is powerless to beget, and
+which it can only speed up or augment. It cannot give the wing to the
+seed, or the spring, or the hook; or the feather to the bird; or the
+scale to the fish; but it can perfect all these things. The fittest of
+its kind does stand the best chance to survive.</p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+<p>After we have Darwin shorn of his selection theories, what has he
+left? His significance is not lessened. He is still the most
+impressive figure in modern biological science. His attitude of mind,
+the problems he tackled, his methods of work, the nature and scope of
+his inquiries, together with his candor, and his simplicity and
+devotion to truth, are a precious heritage to all mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin's work is monumental because he belongs to the class of
+monumental men. The doc<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>trine of evolution as applied to animate
+nature reached its complete evolution in his mind. He stated the
+theory in broader and fuller terms than had any man before him; he
+made it cover the whole stupendous course of evolution. He showed man
+once for all an integral part of the zo&ouml;logic system. He elevated
+natural history, or biology, to the ranks of the great sciences, a
+worthy member of the triumvirate&mdash;astronomy, geology, biology. He
+taught us how to cross-question the very gods of life in their council
+chambers; he showed us what significance attaches to the simplest
+facts of natural history.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin impresses by his personality not less than by his logic and his
+vast storehouse of observations. He was a great man before he was a
+great natural-history philosopher. His patient and painstaking
+observation is a lesson to all nature students. The minutest facts
+engaged him. He studies the difference between the stamens of the same
+plant. He counted nine thousand seeds, one by one, from artificially
+fertilized pods. Plants from two pollens, he says, grow at different
+rates. Any difference in the position of the pistil, or in the size
+and color of the stamens, in individuals of the same species grown
+together, was of keen interest to him.</p>
+
+<p>The best thing about Darwinism is Darwin&mdash;his candor, his patience,
+his simplicity, his devotion to truth, and his power of observation.
+This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span> is about what Professor T. H. Morgan meant when he said: "It is
+the spirit of Darwinism, not its formul&aelig;, that we proclaim as our best
+heritage." He gave us a new point of view of the drama of creation; he
+gave us ideas that are applicable to the whole domain of human
+activities. It is true, he was not a pioneer in this field: he did not
+blaze the first trail through this wilderness of biological facts and
+records; rather was he like a master-engineer who surveys and
+establishes the great highway. All the world now travels along the
+course he established and perfected. He made the long road of
+evolution easy, and he placed upon permanent foundations the doctrine
+of the animal origin of man. He taught the world to think in terms of
+evolution, and he pointed the way to a rational explanation of the
+diversity of living forms.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>WHAT MAKES A POEM?</h3>
+<p>Pope said that a middling poet was no poet at all. Middling things in
+art or in any field of human endeavor do not arouse our enthusiasm,
+and it is enthusiasm that fans the fires of life. There are all
+degrees of excellence, but in poetry one is always looking for the
+best. Pope himself holds a place in English literature which he could
+not hold had he been only a middling poet. He is not a poet of the
+highest order certainly, but a poet of the third or fourth order&mdash;the
+poet of the reason, the understanding, but not of the creative
+imagination. It is wit and not soul that keeps Pope alive.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly every age and land has plenty of middling poets. Probably there
+were never more of them in the land than there are to-day. Scores of
+volumes of middling verse are issued from the press every week. The
+magazines all have middling verse; only at rare intervals do they have
+something more. The May "Atlantic," for instance, had a poem by a (to
+me) comparatively new writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, that one would
+hardly stigmatize as middling poetry. Let the reader judge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span> for
+himself. It is called "Spring in the Study." I quote only the second
+part:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What is this sudden gayety that shakes the grayest boughs?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A voice is calling fieldward&mdash;'T is time to start the ploughs!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To set the furrows rolling, while all the old crows nod;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And deep as life, the kernel, to cut the golden sod.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The pen&mdash;let nations have it;&mdash;we'll plough a while for God.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When half the things that must be done are greater than our art,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And half the things that must be done are smaller than our heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And poorest gifts are dear to burn on altars unrevealed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like music comes the summons, the challenge from the weald!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'They tread immortal measures who make a mellow field!'<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The planet's rather pleasant, alluring in its way;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But let the ploughs be idle and none of us can stay.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here's where there is no doubting, no ghosts uncertain stalk,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A-traveling with the plough beam, beneath the sailing hawk,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cutting the furrow deep and true where Destiny will walk."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Lafcadio Hearn spoke with deep truth when he said that "the measure of
+a poet is the largeness of thought which he can bring to any subject,
+however trifling." Certainly Mrs. Dargan brings this largeness of
+thought to her subject. Has the significance of the plough ever before
+been so brought out? She makes one feel that there should be a plough
+among the constellations. What are the chairs and harps and dippers in
+comparison?</p>
+
+<p>The poetry of mere talent is always middling poetry&mdash;"poems distilled
+from other poems," as Whitman says. The work of a genius is of a
+different order. Most current verse is merely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span> sweetened prose put up
+in verse form. It serves its purpose; the mass of readers like it.
+Nearly all educated persons can turn it off with little effort. I have
+done my share of it myself&mdash;rhymed natural history, but not poetry.
+"Waiting" is my nearest approach to a true poem.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth quotes Aristotle as saying that poetry is the most
+philosophical of all writing, and Wordsworth agrees with him. There
+certainly can be no great poetry without a great philosopher behind
+it&mdash;a man who has thought and felt profoundly upon nature and upon
+life, as Wordsworth himself surely had. The true poet, like the
+philosopher, is a searcher after truth, and a searcher at the very
+heart of things&mdash;not cold, objective truth, but truth which is its own
+testimony, and which is carried alive into the heart by passion. He
+seeks more than beauty, he seeks the perennial source of beauty. The
+poet leads man to nature as a mother leads her child there&mdash;to instill
+a love of it into his heart. If a poet adds neither to my knowledge
+nor to my love, of what use is he? For instance, Poe does not make me
+know more or love more, but he delights me by his consummate art.
+Bryant's long poem "The Ages" has little value, mainly because it is
+charged with no philosophy, and no imaginative emotion. His "Lines to
+a Waterfowl" will last because of the simple, profound human emotion
+they awaken.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> The poem is marred, however, by the stanza that he tacks
+on the end, which strikes a note entirely foreign to the true spirit
+of the poem. You cannot by tacking a moral to a poem give it the
+philosophical breadth to which I have referred. "Thanatopsis" has a
+solemn and majestic music, but not the unique excellence of the
+waterfowl poem. Yet it may be generally said of Bryant that he has a
+broad human outlook on life and is free from the subtleties and
+ingenious refinements of many of our younger poets.</p>
+
+<p>I know of only three poets in this century who bring a large measure
+of thought and emotion to their task. I refer to William Vaughn Moody,
+to John Russell McCarthy (author of "Out-of-Doors" and "Gods and
+Devils"), and to Robert Loveman, best known for his felicitous "Rain
+Song," a poem too well known to be quoted here. Any poet who has ever
+lived might have been proud to have written that poem. It goes as
+lightly as thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its philosophy
+is so sublimated and so natural and easy that we are likely to forget
+that it has any philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his
+"Gates of Silence" are probably far less well known. Let me quote a
+few of them:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The races rise and fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The nations come and go,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Time tenderly doth cover all<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With violets and snow.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The mortal tide moves on<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To some immortal shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Past purple peaks of dusk and dawn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Into the evermore.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<hr style='width: 35%;' />
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All the tomes of all the tribes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the songs of all the scribes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All that priest and prophet say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What is it? and what are they?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Fancies futile, feeble, vain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Idle dream-drift of the brain,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As of old the mystery<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Doth encompass you and me.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<hr style='width: 35%;' />
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Old and yet young, the jocund Earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Doth speed among the spheres,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her children of imperial birth<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Are all the golden years.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The happy orb sweeps on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Led by some vague unrest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some mystic hint of joys unborn<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Springing within her breast."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What takes one in "The Gates of Silence," which, of course, means the
+gates of death, are the large, sweeping views. The poet strides
+through time and space like a Colossus and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">"flings<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Out of his spendthrift hands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The whirling worlds like pebbles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The mesh&egrave;d stars like sands."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Loveman's stanzas have not the flexibility and freedom of those of
+Moody and McCarthy, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span> they bring in full measure the largeness of
+thought which a true poem requires.</p>
+
+<p>Some of Moody's poems rank with the best in the literature of his
+time. He was deeply moved by the part we played in the
+Spanish-American War. It was a war of shame and plunder from the point
+of view of many of the noblest and most patriotic men of the country.
+We freed Cuba from the Spanish yoke and left her free; but we seized
+the Philippines and subdued the native population by killing a vast
+number of them&mdash;more than half of them, some say. Commercial
+exploitation inspired our policy. How eloquently Senator Hoar of
+Massachusetts inveighed against our course! We promised the Filipinos
+their freedom&mdash;a promise we have not yet fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>Moody's most notable poems are "Gloucester Moors," "An Ode in Time of
+Hesitation" (inspired by the Shaw Monument in Boston, the work of
+Saint-Gaudens), "The Brute," "The Daguerreotype," and "On a Soldier
+Fallen in the Philippines." In this last poem throb and surge the
+mingled emotions of pride and shame which the best minds in the
+country felt at the time&mdash;shame at our mercenary course, and pride in
+the fine behavior of our soldiers. It is true we made some pretense of
+indemnifying Spain by paying her twenty million dollars, which was
+much like the course of a boy who throws another boy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span> down and
+forcibly takes his jack-knife from him, then gives him a few coppers
+to salve his wounds. I remember giving Moody's poem to Charles Eliot
+Norton (one of those who opposed the war), shortly after it appeared.
+He read it aloud with marked emotion. Let me quote two of its stanzas:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Toll! Let the great bells toll<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Till the clashing air is dim.<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Did we wrong this parted soul?<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">We will make it up to him.<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Toll! Let him never guess<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">What work we set him to.<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Laurel, laurel, yes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">He did what we bade him do.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own heart's-blood.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"A flag for the soldier's bier<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Who dies that his land may live;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">O, banners, banners here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">That he doubt not nor misgive!<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">That he heed not from the tomb<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The evil days draw near<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">When the nation, robed in gloom,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">With its faithless past shall strive.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island mark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When I say that every true poet must have a philosophy, I do not mean
+that he must be what is commonly called a philosophical poet; from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+such we steer clear. The philosophy in a poem must be like the iron in
+the blood. It is the iron that gives color and vigor to the blood.
+Reduce it and we become an an&aelig;mic and feeble race. Much of the popular
+poetry is an&aelig;mic in this respect. There is no virile thought in it.
+All of which amounts to saying that there is always a great nature
+back of a great poem.</p>
+
+<p>The various forms of verse are skillfully used by an increasing number
+of educated persons, but the number of true poets is not increasing.
+Quite the contrary, I fear. The spirit of the times in which we live
+does not favor meditation and absorption in the basic things out of
+which great poetry arises. "The world is too much with us." Yet we
+need not be too much discouraged. England has produced Masefield, and
+we have produced John Russell McCarthy, who has written the best
+nature poetry since Emerson. The genius of a race does not repeat. We
+shall never again produce poets of the type of those that are gone,
+and we should not want to. All we may hope for is to produce poets as
+original and characteristic and genuine as those of the past&mdash;poets
+who as truly express the spirit of their time, as the greater poets
+did of theirs&mdash;not Emerson and Whitman over again, but a wide
+departure from their types.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of Whitman, may we not affirm that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> it is his tremendous and
+impassioned philosophy suffusing his work, as the blood suffuses the
+body, that keeps "Leaves of Grass" forever fresh? We do not go to
+Whitman for pretty flowers of poesy, although they are there, but we
+go to him for his attitude toward life and the universe, we go to
+stimulate and fortify our souls&mdash;in short, for his cosmic philosophy
+incarnated in a man.</p>
+
+<p>What largeness of thought Tennyson brings to all his themes! There is
+plenty of iron in his blood, though it be the blood of generations of
+culture, and of an overripe civilization. We cannot say as much of
+Swinburne's poetry or prose. I do not think either will live. Bigness
+of words, and fluency, and copiousness of verse cannot make up for the
+want of a sane and rational philosophy. Arnold's poems always have
+real and tangible subject matter. His "Dover Beach" is a great stroke
+of poetic genius. Let me return to Poe: what largeness of thought did
+he bring to his subjects? Emerson spoke of him as "the jingle man,"
+and Poe, in turn, spoke of Emerson with undisguised contempt. Poe's
+picture indicates a neurotic person. There is power in his eyes, but
+the shape of his head is abnormal, and a profound melancholy seems to
+rest on his very soul. What a conjurer he was with words and meters
+and measures! No substance at all in his "Raven," only shadows&mdash;a
+wonderful dance of shadows, all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span> tricks of a verbal wizard. "The
+Bells," a really powerful poem, is his masterpiece, unique in English
+literature; but it has no intellectual content. Its appeal is to the
+eye and ear alone. It has a verbal splendor and a mastery over measure
+and rhythm far beyond anything in Shelley, or in any other poet of his
+time. It is art glorified; it is full of poetic energy. No wonder
+foreign critics see in Poe something far beyond that found in any
+other American, or in any British poet!</p>
+
+<p>Poe set to work to write "The Raven" as deliberately as a mechanic
+goes to work to make a machine, or an architect to build a house. It
+was all a matter of calculation with him. He did not believe in long
+poems, hence decided at the outset that his poem should not be more
+than one hundred lines in length. Then he asked himself, what is the
+legitimate end and aim of a poem? and answered emphatically, Beauty.
+The next point to settle was, what impression must be made to produce
+that effect? He decided that "melancholy is the most legitimate of all
+poetic tones." Why joy or gladness, like that of the birds, is not
+equally legitimate, he does not explain. Then, to give artistic
+piquancy to the whole, he decided that there must be "some pivot upon
+which the whole structure might turn." He found that "no one had been
+so universally employed as the refrain." The burden of the poem should
+be given by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span> refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should have
+brevity. Then his task was to select a single word that would be in
+keeping with the melancholy at which he was aiming, and this he found
+in the word <i>nevermore</i>. He next invented a pretext for the frequent
+but varying use of <i>nevermore</i>. This word could not be spoken in the
+right tone by a human being; it must come from an unreasoning
+creature, hence the introduction of the raven, an ill-omened bird, in
+harmony with the main tone of the poem. He then considered what was
+the most melancholy subject of mankind, and found it was death, and
+that that melancholy theme was most poetical when allied to beauty.
+Hence the death of a beautiful woman was unquestionably the most
+poetic topic in the world. It was equally beyond doubt that the lips
+best suited for such topic were those of a bereaved lover. Thus he
+worked himself up, or rather back, to the climax of the poem, for he
+wrote the last stanza, in which the climax occurs, first. His own
+analysis of the poem is like a chemist's analysis of some new compound
+he has produced; it is full of technical terms and subtle
+distinctions. Probably no other famous poem was turned out in just
+that studied and deliberate architectural way&mdash;no pretense of
+inspiration, or of "eyes in fine frenzy rolling": just skilled
+craftsmanship&mdash;only this and nothing more.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Arnold's dictum that poetry is a criticism of life is, in a large and
+flexible sense, true. The poet does not criticize life as the
+conscious critic does, but as we unconsciously do in our most exalted
+moments. Arnold, I believe, did not appreciate Whitman, but one
+function of the poet upon which Whitman lays emphasis, is criticism of
+his country and times.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What is this you bring, my America?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is it uniform with my country?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is it not something that has been better done or told before?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?&mdash;is the good old cause in it?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literates of enemies, lands?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my strength, gait, face?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have real employments contributed to it?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Original makers, not mere amanuenses?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Speaking of criticism, it occurs to me how important it is that a
+poet, or any other writer, should be a critic of himself. Wordsworth,
+who was a really great poet, was great only at rare intervals. His
+habitual mood was dull and prosy. His sin was that he kept on writing
+during those moods, grinding out sonnets by the hundred&mdash;one hundred
+and thirty-two ecclesiastical sonnets, and over half as many on
+liberty, all very dull and wooden. His mill kept on grinding whether
+it had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> any grist of the gods to grind or not. He told Emerson he was
+never in haste to publish, but he seems to have been in haste to
+write, and wrote on all occasions, producing much dull and trivial
+work. We speak of a man's work as being heavy. Let us apply the test
+literally to Wordsworth and weigh his verse. The complete edition of
+his poems, edited by Henry Reed and published in Philadelphia in 1851,
+weighs fifty-five ounces; the selection which Matthew Arnold made from
+his complete works, and which is supposed to contain all that is worth
+preserving, weighs ten ounces. The difference represents the dead
+wood. That Wordsworth was a poor judge of his own work is seen in the
+remark he made to Emerson that he did not regard his "Tintern Abbey"
+as highly as some of the sonnets and parts of "The Excursion." I
+believe the Abbey poem is the one by which he will longest be
+remembered. "The Excursion" is a long, dull sermon. Its didacticism
+lies so heavily upon it that it has nearly crushed its poetry&mdash;like a
+stone on a flower.</p>
+
+<p>All poetry is true, but all truth is not poetry. When Burns treats a
+natural-history theme, as in his verses on the mouse and the daisy,
+and even on the louse, how much more there is in them than mere
+natural history! With what a broad and tender philosophy he clothes
+them! how he identifies himself with the mouse and regards himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span> as
+its fellow mortal! So have Emerson's "Titmouse" and "Humble-Bee" a
+better excuse for being than their natural history. So have McCarthy's
+"For a Bunny" and "The Snake," and "To a Worm."</p>
+
+<h3>THE SNAKE</h3>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Poor unpardonable length,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All belly to the mouth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Writhe then and wriggle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If there's joy in it!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>My</i> heel, at least, shall spare you.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A little sun on a stone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A mouse or two,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all that unreasonable belly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is happy.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No wonder God wasn't satisfied&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And went on creating.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<h3>TO A WORM</h3>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Do you know you are green, little worm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like the leaf you feed on?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perhaps it is on account of the birds, who would like to eat you.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But is there any reason why they shouldn't eat you, little worm?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Do you know you are comical, little worm?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How you double yourself up and wave your head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then stretch out and double up again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All after a little food.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Do you know you have a long, strange name, little worm?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will not tell you what it is.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That is for men of learning.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You&mdash;and God&mdash;do not care about such things.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>WHAT MAKES A POEM?</h3>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">You would wave about and double up just as much, and be just as futile, with it as without it.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why do you crawl about on the top of that post, little worm?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It should have been a tree, eh? with green leaves for eating.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But it isn't, and you have crawled about it all day, looking for a new brown branch, or a green leaf.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do you know anything about tears, little worm?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or take McCarthy's lines to the honey bee:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Poor desolate betrayer of Pan's trust,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who turned from mating and the sweets thereof,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To make of labor an eternal lust,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And with pale thrift destroy the red of love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The curse of Pan has sworn your destiny.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unloving, unbeloved, you go your way<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Toiling forever, and unwittingly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You bear love's precious burden every day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From flower to flower (for your blasphemy),<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Poor eunuch, making flower lovers gay."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or this:</p>
+
+<h3>GODLINESS</h3>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I know a man who says<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That he gets godliness out of a book.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">He told me this as we sought arbutus<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the April hills&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Little color-poems of God<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lilted to us from the ground,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lyric blues and whites and pinks.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We climbed great rocks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Eternally chanting their gray elegies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all about, the cadenced hills<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were proud<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the stately green epic of the Almighty.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And then we walked home under the stars,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While he kept telling me about his book<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the godliness in it.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>There are many great lyrics in our literature which have no palpable
+or deducible philosophy; but they are the utterance of deep, serious,
+imaginative natures, and they reach our minds and hearts. Wordsworth's
+"Daffodils," his "Cuckoo," his "Skylark," and scores of others, live
+because they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds and flowers
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Such a poem as Gray's "Elegy" holds its own, and will continue to hold
+it, because it puts in pleasing verse form the universal human emotion
+which all persons feel more or less when gazing upon graves.</p>
+
+<p>The intellectual content of Scott's poems is not great but the human
+and emotional content in them is great. A great minstrel of the border
+speaks in them. The best that Emerson could say of Scott was that "he
+is the delight of generous boys," but the spirit of romance offers as
+legitimate a field for the poet as does the spirit of
+transcendentalism, though yielding, of course, different human values.</p>
+
+<p>Every poet of a high order has a deep moral nature, and yet the poet
+is far from being a mere moralist&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An intellectual all-in-all."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Every true poem is an offering upon the altar of art; it exists to no
+other end; it teaches as nature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> teaches; it is good as nature is
+good; its art is the art of nature; it brings our spirits in closer
+and more loving contact with the universe; it is for the edification
+of the soul.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS</h3>
+<h3><a name="VI_1" id="VI_1"></a>THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT</h3>
+<p>The clouds are transient, but the sky is permanent. The petals of a
+flowering plant are transient, the leaves and fruit are less so, and
+the roots the least transient of all. The dew on the grass is
+transient, as is the frost of an autumn morning. The snows and the
+rains abide longer. The splendors of summer and sunrise and sunset
+soon pass, but the glory of the day lasts. The rainbow vanishes in a
+few moments, but the prismatic effect of the drops of rain is a law of
+optics. Colors fade while texture is unimpaired.</p>
+
+<p>Of course change marks everything, living or dead. Even the pole star
+in astronomic time will vanish. But consider things mundane only. How
+the rocks on the seacoast seem to defy and withstand the waves that
+beat against them! "Weak as is a breaking wave" is a line of
+Wordsworth's. Yet the waves remain after the rocks are gone. The sea
+knows no change as the land does. It and the sky are the two
+unchanging earth features.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In our own lives how transient are our moments of inspiration, our
+morning joy, our ecstasies of the spirit! Upon how much in the world
+of art, literature, invention, modes, may be written the word
+"perishable"! "All flesh is grass," says the old Book. Individuals,
+species, races, pass. Life alone remains and is immortal.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="VI_2" id="VI_2"></a>POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE</h3>
+<p>Positive and negative go hand in hand through the world. Victory and
+defeat, hope and despair, pleasure and pain. Man is positive, woman is
+negative in comparison. The day is positive, the night is negative.
+But it is a pleasure to remember that it is always day in the
+universe.</p>
+
+<p>The shadow of the earth does not extend very far, nor the shadow of
+any other planet. Day is the great cosmic fact. The masses of men are
+negative to the few master and compelling minds. Cold is negative,
+heat is positive, though the difference is only one of degree. The
+negative side of life, the side of meditation, reflection, and
+reverie, is no less important than the side of action and performance.
+Youth is positive, age is negative. Age says No where it used to say
+Yes. It takes in sail. Life's hurry and heat are over, the judgment is
+calm, the passions subdued, the stress of effort relaxed. Our temper
+is less aggressive, events seem less imminent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The morning is positive; in the evening we muse and dream and take our
+ease, we see our friends, we unstring the bow, we indulge our social
+instincts.</p>
+
+<p>Optimism is positive, pessimism is negative. Fear, suspicion,
+distrust&mdash;are all negative.</p>
+
+<p>On the seashore where I write<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> I see the ebbing tide, the exposed
+sand and rocks, the receding waves; and I know the sea is showing us
+its negative side; there is a lull in the battle. But wait a little
+and the mad assault of the waves upon the land will be renewed.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> La Jolla, California.</p></div>
+
+<h3><a name="VI_3" id="VI_3"></a>PALM AND FIST</h3>
+<p>The palm is for friendship, hospitality, and good will; the fist is to
+smite the enemies of truth and justice.</p>
+
+<p>How many men are like the clenched fist&mdash;pugnacious, disputatious,
+quarrelsome, always spoiling for a fight; a verbal fisticuff, if not a
+physical one, is their delight. Others are more conciliatory and
+peace-loving, not forgetting that a soft answer turneth away wrath.
+Roosevelt was the man of the clenched fist; not one to stir up strife,
+but a merciless hitter in what he believed a just cause. He always had
+the fighting edge, yet could be as tender and sympathetic as any one.
+This latter side of him is clearly shown in his recently published
+"Letters to His Children." Lincoln <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>was, in contrast, the man with the
+open palm, tempering justice with kindness, and punishment with
+leniency. His War Secretary, Stanton, wielded the hard fist.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="VI_4" id="VI_4"></a>PRAISE AND FLATTERY</h3>
+<p>"More men know how to flatter," said Wendell Phillips, "than how to
+praise." To flatter is easy, to condemn is easy, but to praise
+judiciously and discriminatingly is not easy. Extravagant praise
+defeats itself, as does extravagant blame. A man is rarely overpraised
+during his own time by his own people. If he is an original, forceful
+character, he is much more likely to be overblamed than overpraised.
+He disturbs old ways and institutions. We require an exalted point of
+view to take in a great character, as we do to take in a great
+mountain.</p>
+
+<p>We are likely to overpraise and overblame our presidents. Lincoln was
+greatly overblamed in his day, but we have made it up to his memory.
+President Wilson won the applause of both political parties during his
+first term, but how overwhelmingly did the tide turn against him
+before the end of his second term! All his high and heroic service
+(almost his martyrdom) in the cause of peace, and for the league to
+prevent war, were forgotten in a mad rush of the populace to the other
+extreme. But Wilson will assuredly come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span> to his own in time, and take
+his place among the great presidents.</p>
+
+<p>A little of the Scottish moderation is not so bad; it is always safe.
+A wise man will always prefer unjust blame to fulsome praise. Extremes
+in the estimation of a sound character are bound sooner or later to
+correct themselves. Wendell Phillips himself got more than his share
+of blame during the antislavery days, but the praise came in due time.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="VI_5" id="VI_5"></a>GENIUS AND TALENT</h3>
+<p>The difference between the two is seen in nothing more clearly than in
+the fact that so many educated persons can and do write fairly good
+verse, in fact, write most of the popular newspaper and magazine
+poetry, while only those who have a genius for poetry write real
+poems. Could mere talent have written Bryant's lines "To a Waterfowl"?
+or his "Thanatopsis"? or "June"? Or the small volume of selections of
+great poetry which Arnold made from the massive works of Wordsworth?</p>
+
+<p>Talent could have produced a vast deal of Wordsworth's work&mdash;all the
+"Ecclesiastical Sonnets" and much of "The Excursion." Could talent
+have written Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"? It could have produced
+all that Whitman wrote before that time&mdash;all his stories and poems.
+Give talent inspiration and it becomes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> genius. The grub is
+metamorphosed into the butterfly.</p>
+
+<p>"To do what is impossible to Talent is the mark of Genius," says
+Amiel.</p>
+
+<p>Talent may judge, Genius creates. Talent keeps the rules, Genius knows
+when to break them.</p>
+
+<p>"You may know Genius," says the ironical Swift, "by this sign: All the
+dunces are against him."</p>
+
+<p>There is fine talent in Everett's oration at Gettysburg, but what a
+different quality spoke in Lincoln's brief but immortal utterance on
+the same occasion! Is anything more than bright, alert talent shown in
+the mass of Lowell's work, save perhaps in his "Biglow Papers"? If he
+had a genius for poetry, though he wrote much, I cannot see it. His
+tone, as Emerson said, is always that of prose. The "Cathedral" is a
+<i>tour de force</i>. The line of his so often quoted&mdash;"What is so rare as
+a day in June?"&mdash;is a line of prose.</p>
+
+<p>The lines "To a Honey Bee" by John Russell McCarthy are the true gold
+of poetry. "To make of labor an eternal lust" could never have been
+struck off by mere talent.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="VI_6" id="VI_6"></a>INVENTION AND DISCOVERY</h3>
+<p>Columbus discovered America; Edison invented the phonograph, the
+incandescent light, and many other things. If Columbus had not
+discovered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> America, some other voyager would have. If Harvey had not
+discovered the circulation of the blood, some one else would have. The
+wonder is that it was not discovered ages before. So far as I know, no
+one has yet discovered the function of the spleen, but doubtless in
+time some one will. It is only comparatively recently that the
+functions of other ductless glands have been discovered. What did we
+know about the thyroid gland a half-century ago? All the new
+discoveries in the heavens waited upon the new astronomic methods, and
+the end is not yet. Many things in nature are still like an unexplored
+land. New remedies for the ills of the human body doubtless remain to
+be found. In the mechanical world probably no new principle remains to
+be discovered. "Keely" frauds have had their day. In the chemical
+world, the list of primary elements will probably not be added to,
+though new combinations of these elements may be almost endless. In
+the biological world, new species of insects, birds, and mammals
+doubtless remain to be discovered. Our knowledge of the natural
+history of the globe is far from being complete.</p>
+
+<p>But in regard to inventions the case is different. I find myself
+speculating on such a question as this: If Edison had never been born,
+should we ever have had the phonograph, or the incandescent light? If
+Graham Bell had died in infancy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span> should we ever have had the
+telephone? Or without Marconi should we have had the wireless, or
+without Morse, the telegraph? Or, to go back still farther, without
+Franklin should we ever have known the identity of lightning and
+electricity? Who taught us how to control electricity and make it do
+our work? One of the questions of Job was, "Canst thou send
+lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" Yes, we
+can. "We are ready to do your bidding," they seem to say, "to run your
+errands, to carry your burdens, to grind your grist, to light your
+houses, to destroy your enemies."</p>
+
+<p>The new inventions that the future holds for us wait upon the new man.
+The discovery of radium&mdash;what a secret that was! But in all
+probability had not Curie and his wife discovered it, some other
+investigator would.</p>
+
+<p>Shall we ever learn how to use the atomic energy that is locked up in
+matter? Or how to use the uniform temperature of the globe? Or the
+secret of the glow-worm and firefly&mdash;light without heat?</p>
+
+<p>The laws of the conservation of energy and of the correlation of
+forces were discoveries. The art of aviation was both an invention and
+a discovery. The soaring hawks and eagles we have always been familiar
+with; the Wright brothers invented the machine that could do the
+trick.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Necessity is the mother of invention." As our wants increase, new
+devices to meet them appear. How the diving-bell answered a real need!
+The motor-car also, and the flying-machine. The sewing-machine is a
+great time-saver; the little hooks in our shoes in place of eyelets
+are great time-savers; pins, and friction matches, and rubber
+overshoes, and scores on scores of other inventions answer to real
+needs. Necessity did not call the phonograph into being, nor the
+incandescent light, but the high explosives, dynamite and T. N. T.
+(trinitrotoluol) met real wants.</p>
+
+<p>The Great War with its submarines stimulated inventors to devise
+weapons to cope with them. Always as man's hand and eyes and ears have
+needed re&euml;nforcing or extending, his wit has come to his rescue. In
+fact, his progress has been contingent upon this very fact. His
+necessities and his power of invention react upon one another; the
+more he invents, the more he wants, and the more he wants, the more he
+invents.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="VI_7" id="VI_7"></a>TOWN AND COUNTRY</h3>
+<p>I was saying to myself, why do not all literary men go to the country
+to do their work, where they can have health, peace, and solitude?
+Then it occurred to me that there are many men of many minds, and that
+many need to be in the thick of life; they get more stimulus out of
+people than out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span> of nature. The novelist especially needs to be in
+touch with multitudes of men and women. But the poet and the
+philosopher will usually prosper better in the country. A man like
+myself, who is an observer and of a meditative cast, does better in
+the country. Emerson, though city born and bred, finally settled in
+the country. Whitman, on the other hand, loved "populous pavements."
+But he was at home anywhere under the stars. He had no study, no
+library, no club, other than the street, the beach, the hilltop, and
+the marts of men. Mr. Howells was country-born, but came to the city
+for employment and remained there. Does not one wish that he had gone
+back to his Ohio boyhood home? It was easy for me to go back because I
+came of generations of farmer folk. The love of the red soil was in my
+blood. My native hills looked like the faces of my father and mother.
+I could never permanently separate myself from them. I have always had
+a kind of chronic homesickness. Two or three times a year I must
+revisit the old scenes. I have had a land-surveyor make a map of the
+home farm, and I have sketched in and colored all the different fields
+as I knew them in my youth. I keep the map hung up in my room here in
+California, and when I want to go home, I look at this map. I do not
+see the paper. I see fields and woods and stone walls and paths and
+roads and grazing cattle. In this field<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span> I used to help make hay; in
+this one I wore my fingers sore picking up stones for these stone
+walls; in this I planted corn and potatoes with my brothers. In these
+maple woods I helped make sugar in the spring; in these I killed my
+first ruffed grouse. In this field I did my first ploughing, with
+thoughts of an academy in a neighboring town at the end of every
+furrow. In this one I burned the dry and decayed stumps in the April
+days, with my younger brother, and a spark set his cap on fire. In
+this orchard I helped gather the apples in October. In this barn we
+husked the corn in the November nights. In this one Father sheared the
+sheep, and Mother picked the geese. My paternal grandfather cleared
+these fields and planted this orchard. I recall the hired man who
+worked for us during my time, and every dog my father had, and my
+adventures with them, hunting wood-chucks and coons. All these things
+and memories have been valuable assets in my life. But it is well that
+not all men have my strong local attachments. The new countries would
+never get settled. My forefathers would never have left Connecticut
+for the wilderness of the Catskills.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, however, we are a drifting, cosmopolitan people. We are
+easily transplanted; we do not strike our roots down into the geology
+of long-gone time.</p>
+
+<p>I often wonder how so many people of the Old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> World can pull
+themselves up and migrate to America and never return. The Scots,
+certainly a home-loving race, do it, and do not seem to suffer from
+homesickness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>DAY BY DAY</h3>
+<p>We often hear it said of a man that he was born too early, or too
+late, but is it ever true? If he is behind his times, would he not
+have been behind at whatever period he had been born? If he is ahead
+of his times, is not the same thing true? In the vegetable world the
+early flowers and fruit blossoms are often cut off by the frost, but
+not so in the world of man. Babies are in order at any time. Is a
+poet, or a philosopher, ever born too late? or too early? If Emerson
+had been born a century earlier, his heterodoxy would have stood in
+his way; but in that case he would not have been a heretic. Whitman
+would have had to wait for a hearing at whatever period he was born.
+He said he was willing to wait for the growth of the taste for
+himself, and it finally came. Emerson's first thin volume called
+"Nature" did not sell the first edition of five hundred copies in ten
+years, but would it have been different at any other time? A piece of
+true literature is not superseded. The fame of man may rise and fall,
+but it lasts. Was Watt too early with his steam-engine, or Morse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span> too
+early with his telegraph? Or Bell too early with his telephone? Or
+Edison with his phonograph or his incandescent light? Or the Wright
+brothers with their flying-machine? Or Henry Ford with his motor-car?
+Before gasolene was discovered they would have been too early, but
+then their inventions would not have materialized.</p>
+
+<p>The world moves, and great men are the springs of progress. But no man
+is born too soon or too late.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A fadeless flower is no flower at all. How Nature ever came to produce
+one is a wonder. Would not paper flowers do as well?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The most memorable days in our lives are the days when we meet a great
+man.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How stealthy and silent a thing is that terrible power which we have
+under control in our homes, yet which shakes the heavens in thunder!
+It comes and goes as silently as a spirit. In fact, it is nearer a
+spirit than anything else known to us. We touch a button and here it
+is, like an errand-boy who appears with his cap in his hand and meekly
+asks, "What will you have?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A few days ago I was writing of meteoric men. But are we not all like
+meteors that cut across the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span> sky and are quickly swallowed up by the
+darkness&mdash;some of us leaving a trail that lasts a little longer than
+others, but all gone in a breath?</p>
+
+<p>Our great pulpit orator Beecher, how little he left that cold print
+does not kill! As a young man I used nearly to run my legs off to get
+to Plymouth Church before the doors were closed. Under his
+trumpet-like voice I was like a reed bent by the wind, but now when in
+a book made up of quotations I see passages from his sermons, they
+seem thin and flimsy. Beecher's oratory was all for the ear and not
+for the eye and mind. In truth, is the world indebted to the pulpit
+for much good literature? Robertson's sermons can be read in the
+library, and there are others of the great English divines. But
+oratory is action and passion. "Great volumes of animal heat," Emerson
+names as one of the qualities of the orator.</p>
+
+<p>The speeches of Wendell Phillips will bear print because his oratory
+was of the quiet, conversational kind. Webster's, of course, stand the
+test of print, but do Clay's or Calhoun's? In our time oratory, as
+such, has about gone out. Rarely now do we hear the eagle scream in
+Congress or on the platform. Men aim to speak earnestly and
+convincingly, but not oratorically. President Wilson is a very
+convincing speaker, but he indulges in no oratory. The one who makes a
+great effort to be eloquent always fails. Noise and fury and
+over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>-emphasis are not eloquent. "True eloquence," says Pascal,
+"scorns eloquence."</p>
+
+<p>There is no moral law in nature, but there is that out of which the
+moral law arose. There is no answer to prayer in the heavens above, or
+in the earth beneath, except in so far as the attitude of sincere
+prayer is a prophecy of the good it pleads for. Prayer for peace of
+mind, for charity, for gratitude, for light, for courage, is answered
+in the sincere asking. Prayer for material good is often prayer
+against wind and tide, but wind and tide obey those who can rule them.</p>
+
+<p>Our ethical standards injected into world-history lead to confusion
+and contradiction. Introduced into the jungle, they would put an end
+to life there; introduced into the sea, they would put an end to life
+there; the rule that it is more blessed to give than to receive would
+put an end to all competitive business. Our ethical standards are
+narrow, artificial, and apply only to civilized communities. Nations
+have rarely observed them till the present day.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>If the world is any better for my having lived in it, it is because I
+have pointed the way to a sane and happy life on terms within reach of
+all, in my love and joyous acceptance of the works of Nature about me.
+I have not tried, as the phrase is, to lead my readers from Nature up
+to Nature's God,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> because I cannot separate the one from the other. If
+your heart warms toward the visible creation, and toward your fellow
+men, you have the root of the matter in you. The power we call God
+does not sustain a mechanical or secondary relation to the universe,
+but is vital in it, or one with it. To give this power human
+lineaments and attributes, as our fathers did, only limits and
+belittles it. And to talk of leading from Nature up to Nature's God is
+to miss the God that throbs in every spear of grass and vibrates in
+the wing of every insect that hums. The Infinite is immanent in this
+universe.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"The faith that truth exists" is the way that William James begins one
+of his sentences. Of course truth exists where the mind of man exists.
+A new man and there is new truth. Truth, in this sense, is a way of
+looking at things that is agreeable, or that gives satisfaction to the
+human mind. Truth is not a definite fixed quantity, like the gold or
+silver of a country. It is no more a fixed quantity than is beauty. It
+is an experience of the human mind. Beauty and truth are what we make
+them. We say the world is full of beauty. What we mean is that the
+world is full of things that give us the pleasure, or awaken in us the
+sentiment which we call by that name.</p>
+
+<p>The broadest truths are born of the broadest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span> minds. Narrow minds are
+so named from their narrow views of things.</p>
+
+<p>Pilate's question, "What is Truth?" sets the whole world by the ears.
+The question of right and wrong is another thing. Such questions refer
+to action and the conduct of our lives. In religion, in politics, in
+economics, in sociology, what is truth to one man may be error to
+another. We may adopt a course of action because it seems the more
+expedient. Debatable questions have two sides to them. In the moral
+realm that is true which is agreeable to the largest number of
+competent judges. A mind that could see further and deeper might
+reverse all our verdicts. To be right on any question in the moral
+realm is to be in accord with that which makes for the greatest good
+to the greatest number. In our Civil War the South believed itself
+right in seceding from the Union; the North, in fighting to preserve
+the Union. Both sections now see that the North had the larger right.
+The South was sectional, the North national. Each of the great
+political parties thinks it has a monopoly of the truth, but the truth
+usually lies midway between them. Questions of right and wrong do not
+necessarily mean questions of true and false. "There is nothing either
+good or bad," says Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." This may be
+good Christian Science doctrine, but it is doubtful philosophy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Yesterday, as I stood on the hill above Slabsides and looked over the
+landscape dotted with farms just greening in the April sun, the
+thought struck me afresh that all this soil, all the fertile fields,
+all these leagues on leagues of sloping valleys and rolling hills came
+from the decay of the rocks, and that the chief agent in bringing
+about this decay and degradation was the gentle rain from heaven&mdash;that
+without the rain through the past geologic ages, the scene I looked
+upon would have been only one wild welter of broken or crumpled rocky
+strata, not a green thing, not a living thing, should I have seen.</p>
+
+<p>In the Hawaiian Islands one may have proof of this before his eyes. On
+one end of the island of Maui, the rainfall is very great, and its
+deep valleys and high sharp ridges are clothed with tropical verdure,
+while on the other end, barely ten miles away, rain never falls, and
+the barren, rocky desolation which the scene presents I can never
+forget. No rain, no soil; no soil, no life.</p>
+
+<p>We are, therefore, children of the rocks; the rocks are our mother,
+and the rains our father.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When the stream of life, through some favoring condition, breaks
+through its natural checks and bounds, and inundates and destroys
+whole provinces of other forms, as when the locusts, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+forest-worms, the boll-weevil, the currant-worm, the potato beetle,
+unduly multiply and devastate fields and forests and the farmer's
+crops, what do we witness but Nature's sheer excess and intemperance?
+Life as we usually see it is the result of a complex system of checks
+and counter-checks. The carnivorous animals are a check on the
+herbivorous; the hawks and owls are a check on the birds and fowls;
+the cats and weasels are a check on the small rodents, which are very
+prolific. The different species of plants and trees are a check upon
+one another.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I think the main reason of the abundance of wealth in the country is
+that every man, equipped as he is with so many modern scientific
+appliances and tools, is multiplied four or five times. He is equal to
+that number of men in his capacity to do things as compared with the
+men of fifty or seventy years ago. The farmer, with his
+mowing-machine, his horse-rake, his automobile, his tractor engine and
+gang ploughs or his sulky ploughs, his hay-loader, his corn-planter,
+and so on, does the work of many men. Machinery takes the place of
+men. Gasolene and kerosene oil give man a great advantage. Dynamite,
+too,&mdash;what a giant that is in his service! The higher cost of living
+does not offset this advantage.</p>
+
+<p>The condition in Europe at this time is quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> different: there the
+energies of men have been directed not to the accumulation of wealth,
+but to the destruction of wealth. Hence, while the war has enriched
+us, it has impoverished Europe.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Why are women given so much more to ornaments and superfluities in
+dress and finery than men? In the animal kingdom below man, save in a
+few instances, it is the male that wears the showy decorations. The
+male birds have the bright plumes; the male sheep have the big horns;
+the stag has the antlers; the male lion has the heavy mane; the male
+firefly has wings and carries the lamp. With the barnyard fowl the
+male has the long spurs and the showy comb and wattles. In the crow
+tribe, the male cannot be distinguished from the female, nor among the
+fly-catchers, nor among the snipes and plovers. But when we come to
+the human species, and especially among the white races, the female
+fairly runs riot in ornamentation. If it is not to attract the male,
+what is it for? It has been pretty clearly shown that what Darwin
+calls "sexual selection" plays no part. Woman wishes to excite the
+passion of love. She has an instinct for motherhood; the perpetuity of
+the species is at the bottom of it all. Woman knows how to make her
+dress alluring, how to make it provocative, how much to reveal, how
+much to conceal. A certain voluptuousness is the ambition<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span> of all
+women; anything but to be skinny and raw-boned. She does not want to
+be muscular and flat-chested, nor, on the other hand, to be
+over-stout, but she prays for the flowing lines and the plumpness that
+belong to youth. A lean man does not repel her, nor a rugged, bony
+frame. Woman's garments are of a different texture and on a different
+scale than those of man, and much more hampering. Her ruffles and
+ribbons and laces all play their part. Her stockings even are a vital
+problem, more important than her religion. We do not care where she
+worships if her dress is attractive. Emerson reports that a lady said
+to him that a sense of being well-dressed at church gave a
+satisfaction which religion could not give.</p>
+
+<p>With man the male defends and safeguards the female. True that among
+savage tribes he makes a slave of her, but in the white races he will
+defend her with his life. She does not take up arms, she does not go
+to sea. She does not work in mines, or as a rule engage in the rough
+work of the world. In Europe she works in the field, and we have had
+farmerettes in this country, but I know of no feminine engineers or
+carpenters or stone masons. There have been a few women explorers and
+Alpine climbers, and investigators in science, but only a few. The
+discovery of radium is chiefly accredited to a woman, and women have a
+few valuable inventions to their credit. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span> saw a valuable and
+ingenious machine, in a great automobile factory, that was invented by
+a woman. Now that woman has won the franchise in this country, we are
+waiting to see if politics will be purified.</p>
+
+<p>The "weaker sex," surely. How much easier do women cry than men! how
+much more easily are they scared! And yet, how much more pain they can
+endure! And how much more devoted are they to their children!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Why does any extended view from a mountain-top over a broad landscape,
+no matter what the features of that landscape, awaken in us the
+emotion of the beautiful? Is it because the eye loves a long range, a
+broad sweep? Or do we have a sense of victory? The book of the
+landscape is now open before us, and we can read it page after page.
+All these weary miles where we tramped, and where the distance, as it
+were, was in ambush, we now command at a glance. Big views expand the
+mind as deep inhalations of air expand the lungs.</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday I stood on the top of Grossmont,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> probably a thousand feet
+above the landscape, and looked out over a wide expanse of what seemed
+to be parched, barren country; a few artificial lakes or ponds of
+impounded rains, but not a green <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>thing in sight, and yet I was filled
+with pleasurable emotion. I lingered and lingered and gazed and gazed.
+The eye is freed at such times, like a caged bird, and darts far and
+near without hindrance.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> In San Diego County, California.</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The wings of time are black and white,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pied with morning and with night."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Thus do we objectify that which has no objective existence, but is
+purely a subjective experience. Do we objectify light and sound in the
+same way? No. One can conceive of the vibrations in the ether that
+give us the sensation of light, and in the air that give us sound.
+These vibrations do not depend upon our organs. Time and tide, we say,
+wait for no man. Certainly the tide does not, as it has a real
+objective existence. But time does not wait or hurry. It neither lags
+nor hastens. Yesterday does not exist, nor to-morrow, nor the Now, for
+that matter. Before we can say the moment has come, it is gone. The
+only change there is is in our states of consciousness. How the hours
+lag when we are waiting for a train, and how they hurry when we are
+happily employed! Can we draw a line between the past and the present?
+Can you find a point in the current of the stream that is stationary?
+We speak of being lavish of time and of husbanding time, of improving
+time, and so on. We divide it into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> seconds and minutes, hours and
+days, weeks, and months, and years. Civilized man is compelled to do
+this; he lives and works by schedule, but it is his states of
+consciousness that he divides and measures. "Time is but a stream I go
+fishing in," says Thoreau. The stream goes by, but the fish stay. The
+river of Time, the tooth of Time&mdash;happy comparisons.</p>
+
+<p>"I wasted time and now time wastes me," says Shakespeare. "I have no
+time." "You have all there is," replied the old Indian.</p>
+
+<p>If time, like money, could be hoarded up, we could get all our work
+done. Is there any time outside of man? The animals take no note of
+time.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That is a good saying of Juvenal's, "He who owns the soil, owns up to
+the sky." So is this of Virgil's, "Command large fields, but cultivate
+small ones."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Can there be any theory or doctrine not connected with our practical
+lives so absurd that it will not be accepted as true by many people?
+How firmly was a belief in witchcraft held by whole populations for a
+generation! My grandfather believed in it, and in spooks and
+hobgoblins.</p>
+
+<p>The belief in alchemy still prevails&mdash;that the baser metals, by the
+aid of the philosopher's stone, can be transmuted into gold and
+silver. Quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span> recently there was a school in a large town in
+California for teaching alchemy. As it was a failure, its professor
+was involved in litigation with his pupils. I believe the pupils were
+chiefly women.</p>
+
+<p>There is a sect in Florida that believe that we live on the inside of
+a hollow sphere, instead of on the outside of a revolving globe. I
+visited the community with Edison, near Fort Myers, several years ago.
+Some of the women were fine-looking. One old lady looked like Martha
+Washington, but the men all looked "as if they had a screw loose
+somewhere." They believe that the sun and moon and all the starry
+hosts of heaven revolve on the inside of this hollow sphere. All our
+astronomy goes by the board. They look upon it as puerile and
+contemptible. The founder of the sect had said he would rise from the
+dead to confirm its truth. His disciples kept his body till the Board
+of Health obliged them to bury it.</p>
+
+<p>If any one were seriously to urge that we really walk on our heads
+instead of our heels, and cite our baldness as proof, there are
+persons who would believe him. It has been urged that flight to the
+moon in an a&euml;roplane is possible&mdash;the want of air is no hindrance! The
+belief in perpetual motion is not yet dead. Many believe that snakes
+charm birds. But it has been found that a stuffed snake-skin will
+"charm" birds also&mdash;the bird is hypnotized by its own fear.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>What has become of the hermits?&mdash;men and women who preferred to live
+alone, holding little or no intercourse with their fellows? In my
+youth I knew of several such. There was old Ike Keator, who lived in a
+little unpainted house beside the road near the top of the mountain
+where we passed over into Batavia Kill. He lived there many years. He
+had a rich brother, a farmer in the valley below. Then there was Eri
+Gray, who lived to be over one hundred years. He occupied a little
+house on the side of a mountain, and lived, it was said, like the pigs
+in the pen. Then there was Aunt Deborah Bouton, who lived in a little
+house by a lonely road and took care of her little farm and her four
+or five cows, winter and summer. Since I have lived here on the Hudson
+there was a man who lived alone in an old stone house amid great filth
+on the top of the hill above Esopus village.</p>
+
+<p>In my own line of descent there was a Kelley who lived alone in a hut
+in the woods, not far from Albany. I myself must have a certain amount
+of solitude, but I love to hear the hum of life all about me. I like
+to be secluded in a building warmed by the presence of other persons.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When I was a boy on the old farm, the bright, warm, midsummer days
+were canopied with the mellow hum of insects. You did not see them or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
+distinguish any one species, but the whole upper air resounded like a
+great harp. It was a very marked feature of midday. But not for fifty
+years have I heard that sound. I have pressed younger and sharper ears
+into my service, but to no purpose: there are certainly fewer
+bumblebees than of old, but not fewer flies or wasps or hornets or
+honey bees. What has wrought the change I do not know.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>If the movements going on around us in inert matter could be magnified
+so as to come within range of our unaided vision, how agitated the
+world would seem! The so-called motionless bodies are all vibrating
+and shifting their places day and night at all seasons. The rocks are
+sliding down the hills or creeping out of their beds, the stone walls
+are reeling and toppling, the houses are settling or leaning. All
+inert material raised by the hand of man above the earth's surface is
+slowly being pulled down to a uniform level. The crust of the earth is
+rising or subsiding. The very stars in the constellations are shifting
+their places.</p>
+
+<p>If we could see the molecular and chemical changes and transformations
+that are going on around us, another world of instability would be
+revealed to us. Here we should see real miracles. We should see the
+odorless gases unite to form water. We should see the building of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
+crystals, catalysis, and the movements of unstable compounds.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Think of what Nature does with varying degrees of temperature&mdash;solids,
+fluids, gases. From the bottom to the top of the universe means simply
+more or less heat. It seems like a misuse of words to say that iron
+freezes at a high temperature, that a bar of red-hot or white-hot iron
+is frozen. Water freezes at a high temperature, the air freezes at a
+vastly lower. Carbon dioxide becomes a solid at a very low
+temperature. Hydrogen becomes a liquid at 252&deg; below zero centigrade,
+and a solid at 264&deg;. The gas fluorine becomes a liquid at 210&deg; below
+zero centigrade.</p>
+
+<p>In a world of absolute zero everything would be as solid as the rocks,
+all life, all chemical reactions would cease. All forms of water are
+the result of more or less heat. The circuit of the waters from the
+earth to the clouds and back again, which keeps all the machinery of
+life a-going, is the work of varying degrees of temperature. The Gulf
+Stream, which plays such a part in the climate of Europe, is the
+result of the heat in the Gulf of Mexico. The glacial periods which
+have so modified the surface of the earth in the past were the result
+of temperature changes.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How habitually we speak of beauty as a positive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span> thing, just as we do
+of truth! whereas what we call beauty is only an emotional experience
+of our own minds, just as light and heat are sensations of our bodies.
+There is no light where there is no eye, and no sound where there is
+no ear. One is a vibration in the ether, and the other a vibration in
+the air. The vibrations are positive. We do not all see beauty in the
+same things. One man is unmoved where another is thrilled. We say the
+world is full of beauty, when we mean that it is full of objects that
+excite this emotion in our minds.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>We speak of truth as if it, too, were a positive thing, and as if
+there were a fixed quantity of it in the world, as there is of gold or
+silver, or diamonds. Truth, again, is an intellectual emotion of the
+human mind. One man's truth is another man's falsehood&mdash;moral and
+&aelig;sthetic truth, I mean. Objective truth (mathematics and science) must
+be the same to all men.</p>
+
+<p>A certain mode of motion in the molecules of matter gives us the
+sensation of heat, but heat is not a thing, an entity in itself, any
+more than cold is. Yet to our senses one seems just as positive as the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>New truth means a new man. There are as many kinds of truth as there
+are human experiences and temperaments.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How adaptive is animal life! It adds a new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span> touch of interest to the
+forbidding cactus to know that the cactus wren builds her nest between
+its leaves. The spines probably serve to protect the bird from her
+enemies. But are they not also a menace to her and to her young? But
+this "procreant cradle" of a bird in the arms of the fanged desert
+growth softens its aspect a little.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The tree of forbidden fruit&mdash;the Tree of Knowledge&mdash;how copiously has
+mankind eaten of it during these latter generations!&mdash;and the chaotic
+state of the world to-day is the result. We have been forcing Nature's
+hand on a tremendous scale. We have gained more knowledge and power
+than we can legitimately use. We are drunk with the sense of power. We
+challenge the very gods. The rapid increase of inventions and the
+harnessing of the powers of Nature have set all nations to
+manufacturing vastly more goods than they can use and they all become
+competitors for world markets, and rivalries and jealousies spring up,
+and the seeds of war are planted. The rapid growth of towns and cities
+is one of the results. The sobering and humanizing influence of the
+country and the farm are less and less in evidence; the excitement,
+the excesses, the intoxication of the cities are more and more. The
+follies and extravagances of wealth lead to the insolence and
+rebellion of the poor. Material power! Drunk with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span> this power, the
+world is running amuck to-day. We have got rid of kings and despots
+and autocratic governments; now if we could only keep sober and make
+democracy safe and enjoyable! Too much science has brought us to
+grief. Behold what Chemistry has done to put imperial power in our
+hands during the last decade!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The grand movements of history and of mankind are like the movements
+of nature, under the same law, elemental, regardless of waste and ruin
+and delays&mdash;not the result of human will or design, but of forces we
+wot not of. They are of the same order as floods, tornadoes,
+earthquakes, a release of human forces that have slumbered. The chaos
+of Europe to-day shows the play of such elemental forces, unorganized,
+at cross-purposes, antagonistic, fighting it out in the attempt to
+find an equilibrium. The pain, the suffering, the waste, the delays,
+do not trouble the gods at all. Since man is a part of nature, why
+should not masses of men be ruled by natural law? The human will
+reaches but a little way.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>GLEANINGS</h3>
+<p>I do not believe that one poet can or does efface another, as Arnold
+suggests. As every gas is a vacuum to every other gas, so every new
+poet is a vacuum to every other poet. Wordsworth told Arnold that for
+many years his poems did not bring him enough to buy his shoestrings.
+The reading public had to acquire a taste for him. Whitman said, "I am
+willing to wait for the growth of the taste of myself." A man who
+likes a poet of real worth is going to continue to like him, no matter
+what new man appears. He may not read him over and over, but he goes
+back to him when the mood is upon him. We listen to the same music
+over and over. We take the same walk over and over. We read
+Shakespeare over and over, and we go back to the best in Wordsworth
+over and over. We get in Tennyson what we do not get in Wordsworth,
+and we as truly get in Wordsworth what we do not get in Tennyson.
+Tennyson was sumptuous and aristocratic. Byron found his audience, but
+he did not rob Wordsworth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that the pre&euml;minence of Wordsworth lies in the fact
+that he deals so entirely with concrete things&mdash;men and objects in
+nature&mdash;and floods or saturates them with moral meanings. There is no
+straining, no hair-splitting, no contortions of the oracle, but it all
+comes as naturally as the sunrise or the sunset.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Things not beautiful in themselves, or when seen near at hand, may and
+do give us the sense of beauty when seen at a distance, or in mass.
+Who has not stood on a mountain-top, and seen before him a wild,
+disorderly landscape that has nevertheless awakened in him the emotion
+of the beautiful? or that has given him the emotion of the sublime?
+Wordsworth's "Daffodils," "Three Years She Grew," "The Solitary
+Reaper," "The Rainbow," "The Butterfly," and many others are merely
+beautiful. These lines from Whitman give one the emotion of the
+sublime:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Outward and outward and forever outward.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>All men may slake their thirst at the same spring of water, but all
+men cannot be thrilled or soothed by beholding the same objects of
+nature. A beautiful child captivates every one, a beautiful woman
+ravishes all eyes. On my way to the Imperial Valley, I recently drove
+across a range of California mountains that had many striking
+features. A lady asked me if I did not think them beautiful. I said,
+"No, they are hideous, but the hideous may be interesting."</p>
+
+<p>The snow is beautiful to many persons, but it is not so to me. It is
+the color of death. I could stand our northern winters very well if I
+could always see the face of the brown or ruddy earth. The snow, I
+know, blankets the fields; and Emerson's poem on the snowstorm is
+fine; at the same time, I would rather not be obliged to look at the
+white fields.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We are the first great people without a past in the European sense. We
+are of yesterday. We do not strike our roots down deep into the
+geology of long-gone ages. We are easily transplanted. We are a
+mixture of all peoples as the other nations of the world are not. Only
+yesterday we were foreigners ourselves. Then we made the first
+experiment on a large scale of a democratic or self-governing people.
+The masses, and not a privileged few, give the tone and complexion to
+things<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly
+national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the
+highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a
+new type of man appearing in this field.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"What think ye of Whitman?" This is the question I feel like putting,
+and sometimes do put, to each young poet I meet. If he thinks poorly
+of Whitman, I think poorly of him. I do not expect great things of
+him, and so far my test holds good. William Winter thought poorly of
+Whitman, Aldrich thought poorly of him, and what lasting thing has
+either of them done in poetry? The memorable things of Aldrich are in
+prose. Stedman showed more appreciation of him, and Stedman wrote two
+or three things that will keep. His "Osawatomie Brown ... he shoved
+his ramrod down" is sure of immortality. Higginson could not stand
+Whitman, and had his little fling at him whenever he got the chance.
+Who reads Higginson now? Emerson, who far outranks any other New
+England poet, was fairly swept off his feet by the first appearance of
+"Leaves of Grass." Whittier, I am told, threw the book in the fire.
+Whittier's fame has not gone far beyond New England. The scholarly and
+academic Lowell could not tolerate Whitman, and if Lowell has ever
+written<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span> any true poetry, I have not seen it. What Longfellow thought
+of him, I do not know. Thoreau saw his greatness at a glance and went
+to see him. In England, I am told, Tennyson used to read him aloud in
+select company. I know that the two poets corresponded. We catch a
+glimpse of Swinburne's spasmodic insight in his first burst of
+enthusiasm over him, and then of his weakness in recanting.
+Swinburne's friend and house-mate, Watts Dunton, never could endure
+him, but what has he done? So it has gone and still is going, though
+now the acceptance of Whitman has become the fashion.</p>
+
+<p>I have always patted myself on the back for seeing the greatness of
+Whitman from the first day that I read a line of his. I was bewildered
+and disturbed by some things, but I saw enough to satisfy me of his
+greatness.</p>
+
+<p>Whitman had the same faith in himself that Kepler had in his work.
+Whitman said:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand, or ten million years,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Kepler said: "The die is cast; the book is written, to be read either
+now or by posterity. I care not which. It may well wait a century for
+a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an observer like
+myself."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Judging from fragments of his letters that I have seen, Henry James
+was unquestionably hypersensitive. In his dislike of publicity he was
+extreme to the point of abnormality; it made him ill to see his name
+in print, except under just the right conditions. He wanted all things
+veiled and softened. He fled his country, abjured it completely. The
+publicity of it, of everything in America&mdash;its climate, its day, its
+night, the garish sun, its fierce, blazing light, the manner of its
+people, its politics, its customs&mdash;fairly made him cringe. During his
+last visit here he tried lecturing, but soon gave it up. He fled to
+veiled and ripened and cushioned England&mdash;not to the country, but to
+smoky London; and there his hypersensitive soul found peace and ease.
+He became a British subject, washed himself completely of every
+vestige of Americanism. This predilection of his probably accounts for
+the obscurity or tantalizing indirectness of his writings. The last
+story I read of his was called "One More Turn of the Screw," but what
+the screw was, or what the turn was, or whether anybody got pinched or
+squeezed, or what it was all about, I have not the slightest idea. He
+wrote about his visit here, his trip to Boston, to Albany, to New
+York, but which town he was writing about you could not infer from the
+context. He had the gift of a rich,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span> choice vocabulary, but he wove it
+into impenetrable, though silken, veils that concealed more than they
+revealed. When replying to his correspondents on the typewriter, he
+would even apologize for "the fierce legibility of the type."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The contrast between the "singing-robes and the overalls of
+Journalism" is true and striking. Good and true writing no magazine or
+newspaper editor will blue-pencil. But "fine" writing is a different
+thing&mdash;a style that is conscious of itself, a style in which the
+thought is commonplace and the language studied and ornate, every
+judicious editor will blue-pencil. Downrightness and sententiousness
+are prime qualities; brevity, concreteness, spontaneity&mdash;in fact, all
+forms of genuine expression&mdash;help make literature. You know the
+genuine from the spurious, gold from pinchbeck, that's the rub. The
+secret of sound writing is not in the language, but in the mind or
+personality behind the language. The dull writer and the inspired
+writer use, or may use, the same words, and the product will be gold
+in the one and lead in the other.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Dana's book ["Two Years Before the Mast"] is a classic because it took
+no thought of being a classic. It is a plain, unvarnished tale, not
+loaded up with tedious descriptions. It is all action, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span> perpetual
+drama in which the sea, the winds, the seamen, the sails&mdash;mainsail,
+main royal, foresail&mdash;play the principal parts.</p>
+
+<p>There is no book depicting life on the sea to compare with it. Lately
+I have again tried to find the secret of its charm. In the first
+place, it is a plain, unvarnished tale, no attempt at fine writing in
+it. All is action from cover to cover. It is full of thrilling,
+dramatic scenes. In fact, it is almost a perpetual drama in which the
+sea, the winds, the storms, the sails, and the sailors play their
+parts. Each sail, from the smallest to the greatest, has its own
+character and its own part to play; sometimes many of them, sometimes
+few are upon the stage at once. Occasionally all the canvas was piled
+on at once, and then what a sight the ship was to behold! Scudding
+under bare poles was dramatic also.</p>
+
+<p>The life on board ship in those times&mdash;its humor, its tedium, its
+dangers, its hardships&mdash;was never before so vividly portrayed. The
+tyranny and cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of that
+little world of the ship's deck, stand out in strong relief. Dana had
+a memory like a phonographic record. Unless he took copious notes on
+this journey, it is incredible how he could have made it so complete,
+so specific is the life of each day. The reader craves more light on
+one point&mdash;the size of the ship, her length and tonnage. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span> setting
+out on the homeward journey they took aboard a dozen sheep, four
+bullocks, a dozen or more pigs, three or four dozen of poultry,
+thousands of dressed and cured hides, as well as fodder and feed for
+the cattle and poultry and pigs. The vessel seemed elastic; they could
+always find room for a few thousand more hides, if the need arose. The
+hides were folded up like the leaves of a book, and they invented
+curious machinery to press in a hundred hides where one could not be
+forced by hand. By this means the forty thousand hides were easily
+disposed of as part of the home cargo.</p>
+
+<p>The ship becomes a living being to the sailors. The Alert was so
+loaded, her cargo so <i>steved</i> in, that she was stiff as a man in a
+strait-jacket. But the old sailors said: "Stand by. You'll see her
+work herself loose in a week or two, and then she'll walk up to Cape
+Horn like a race-horse."</p>
+
+<p>It is curious how the sailors can't work together without a song. "A
+song is as necessary to a sailor as the drum and fife are to the
+soldier. They can't pull in time, or pull with a will, without it."
+Some songs were much more effective than others. "Two or three songs
+would be tried, one after the other, with no effect&mdash;not an inch could
+be got upon the tackles, when a new song struck up seemed to hit the
+humor of the moment and drove the tackles two blocks at once. 'Heave
+round, hearty!' 'Captain gone ashore!' and the like,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span> might do for
+common pulls, but in an emergency, when we wanted a heavy,
+raise-the-dead pull, which would start the beams of the ship, there
+was nothing like 'Time for us to go!' 'Round the corner,' or 'Hurrah!
+Hurrah! my hearty bullies!'"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The mind of the professional critic, like the professional logical
+mind, becomes possessed of certain rules which it adheres to on all
+occasions. There is a well-known legal mind in this country which is
+typical. A recent political opponent of the man says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>His is the type of mind which would have sided with King
+John against granting the Magna Charta; the type of mind
+which would have opposed the ratification of the
+Constitution of the United States because he would have
+found so many holes in it. His is the type of mind which
+would have opposed the Monroe Doctrine on the ground that it
+was dangerous. His is the type of mind which would have
+opposed the Emancipation Proclamation on the ground of
+taking away property without due process of law. His is the
+type of mind which would have opposed Cleveland's Venezuela
+message to England on the ground that it was unprecedented.
+His is the type of mind which did its best in 1912 to oppose
+Theodore Roosevelt's effort to make the Republican Party
+progressive.</p></div>
+
+<p>Such a mind would have no use for Roosevelt, for instance, because
+Roosevelt was not bound by precedents, but made precedents of his own.
+The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span> typical critical mind, such as Arnold's, would deny the title of
+philosopher to a man who has no constructive talent, who could not
+build up his own philosophy into a system. He would deny another the
+title of poet because his verse has not the Miltonic qualities of
+simplicity, of sensuousness, of passion. Emerson was not a great man
+of letters, Arnold said, because he had not the genius and instinct
+for style; his prose had not the requisite wholeness of good tissue.
+Emerson's prose is certainly not Arnold's prose, but at its best it is
+just as effective.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is a good idea of Santayana that "the function of poetry is to
+emotionalize philosophy."</p>
+
+<p>How absurd, even repulsive, is the argument of "Paradise Lost"! yet
+here is great poetry, not in the matter, but in the manner.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Though fallen on evil days, on evil days though fallen."<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"To shun delights and live laborious days."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Common ideas, but what dignity in the expression!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Criticism is easy. When a writer has nothing else to do, he can
+criticize some other writer. But to create and originate is not so
+easy. One may say that appreciation is easy also. How many persons
+appreciate good literature who cannot produce it!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The rash and the audacious are not the same. Audacity means boldness,
+but to be rash often means to be imprudent or foolhardy. When a little
+dog attacks a big dog, as so often happens, his boldness becomes
+rashness. When Charles Kingsley attacked Newman, his boldness turned
+out to be rashness.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Little wonder that in his essay on "Books" Emerson recommends Thomas &agrave;
+Kempis's "Imitation of Christ." Substitute the word Nature for God and
+Christ and much of it will sound very Emersonian. Emerson was a kind
+of New England Thomas &agrave; Kempis. His spirit and attitude of mind were
+essentially the same, only directed to Nature and the modern world.
+Humble yourself, keep yourself in the background, and let the
+over-soul speak. "I desire no consolation which taketh from me
+compunction." "I love no contemplation which leads to pride." "For all
+that which is high is not holy, nor everything that is sweet, good."
+"I had rather feel contrition, than be skilled in the definition of
+it." "All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was
+written." How Emersonian all this sounds!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In a fat volume of forty thousand quotations from the literature of
+all times and countries, com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>piled by some patient and industrious
+person, at least half of it is not worth the paper on which it is
+printed. There seem to be more quotations in it from Shakespeare than
+from any other poet, which is as it should be. There seem to be more
+from Emerson than from any other American poet, which again is as it
+should be. Those from the great names of antiquity&mdash;the Bible, Sadi,
+Cicero, &AElig;schylus, Euripides, Aristotle, and others&mdash;are all worth
+while, and the quotations from Bacon, Newton, Addison, Locke, Chaucer,
+Johnson, Carlyle, Huxley, Tennyson, Goethe are welcome. But the
+quotations from women writers and poets,&mdash;Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Sigourney,
+Jean Ingelow, and others,&mdash;what are they worth? Who would expect
+anything profound from J. G. Holland or Chapin, O. W. Holmes, or
+Alger, or Alcott, or Helps, or Dickens, or Lewes, or Froude, or
+Lowell? I certainly should not.</p>
+
+<p>Such a selection is good to leaf over. Your thought may be kindled or
+fanned here and there. The subjects are arranged alphabetically, and
+embrace nearly all themes of human interest from ability to zephyrs.
+There is very little from Whitman, and, I think, only one quotation
+from Thoreau.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The death of Howells gave me a shock. I had known him long, though not
+intimately. He was my senior by only one month. It had been two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span> years
+or more since I had seen him. Last December I read his charming paper
+on "Eighty Years and After" and enjoyed it greatly. It is a
+masterpiece. No other American man of letters, past or present, could
+have done that. In fact, there has been no other American who achieved
+the all-round literary craftsmanship that Mr. Howells achieved. His
+equal in his own line we have never seen. His felicity on all
+occasions was a wonder. His works do not belong to the literature of
+power, but to the literature of charm, grace, felicity. His style is
+as flexible and as limpid as a mountain rill. Only among the French do
+we find such qualities in such perfection. Some of his
+writings&mdash;"Their Wedding Journey," for instance&mdash;are too photographic.
+We miss the lure of the imagination, such as Hawthorne gave to all his
+pictures of real things. Only one of Howells's volumes have I found
+too thin for me to finish&mdash;his "London Films" was too filmy for me. I
+had read Taine's "London Notes" and felt the force of a different type
+of mind. But Howells's "Eighty Years and After" will live as a
+classic. Oh, the felicity of his style! One of his later poems on
+growing old ("On a Bright Winter's Day" it is called) is a gem.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>SUNDOWN PAPERS</h3>
+<h3><a name="IX_1" id="IX_1"></a>RE-READING BERGSON</h3>
+<p>I am trying again to read Bergson's "Creative Evolution," with poor
+success. When I recall how I was taken with the work ten or more years
+ago, and carried it with me whenever I went from home, I am wondering
+if my mind has become too old and feeble to take it in. But I do not
+have such difficulty with any other of my favorite authors. Bergson's
+work now seems to me a mixture of two things that won't
+mix&mdash;metaphysics and natural science. It is full of word-splitting and
+conjuring with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. The style
+is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. He enlarges upon the
+inability of the intellect to understand or grasp Life. The reason is
+baffled, but sympathy and the emotional nature and the intuitions
+grasp the mystery.</p>
+
+<p>This may be true, the heart often knows what the head does not; but is
+it not the intellect that tells us so? The intellect understands the
+grounds of our inability. We can and do reason about the limitations
+of reason. We do not know how mat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>ter and spirit blend, but we know
+they do blend. The animals live by instinct, and we live largely in
+our emotions, but it is reason that has placed man at the head of the
+animal kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>Bergson himself by no means dispenses with the logical faculty. Note
+his close and convincing reasoning on the development of the
+vertebrate eye, and how inadequate the Darwinian idea of the
+accumulation of insensible variations is to account for it. A closer
+and more convincing piece of reasoning would be hard to find.</p>
+
+<p>Bergson's conception of two currents&mdash;an upward current of spirit and
+a downward current of matter&mdash;meeting and uniting at a definite time
+and place and producing life, is extremely fanciful. Where had they
+both been during all the geologic ages? I do not suppose they had been
+any <i>where</i>. How life arose is, of course, one of the great mysteries.
+But do we not know enough to see that it did not originate in this
+sudden spectacular way?&mdash;that it began very slowly, in unicellular
+germs?</p>
+
+<p>At first I was so captivated by the wonderful style of M. Bergson, and
+the richness of his page in natural history, that I could see no flaws
+in his subject-matter, but now that my enthusiasm has cooled off a
+little I return to him and am looking closer into the text.</p>
+
+<p>Is not Bergson guilty of false or careless reason<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>ing when he says
+that the relation of the soul to the brain is like that of a coat to
+the nail upon which it hangs? I call this spurious or pinchbeck
+analogy. If we know anything about it, do we not know that the
+relation of the two is not a mechanical or fortuitous one? and that it
+cannot be defined in this loose way?</p>
+
+<p>"To a large extent," Bergson says, "thought is independent of the
+brain." "The brain is, strictly speaking, neither an organ of thought,
+nor of feeling, nor of consciousness." He speaks of consciousness as
+if it were a disembodied something floating around in the air
+overhead, like wireless messages. If I do not think with my brain,
+with what do I think? Certainly not with my legs, or my abdomen, or my
+chest. I think with my head, or the gray matter of my brain. I look
+down at the rest of my body and I say, this is part of me, but it is
+not the real me. With both legs and both arms gone, I should still be
+I. But cut off my head and where am I?</p>
+
+<p>Has not the intelligence of the animal kingdom increased during the
+geologic ages with the increase in the size of the brain?</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_2" id="IX_2"></a>REVISIONS</h3>
+<p>I have little need to revise my opinion of any of the great names of
+English literature. I probably make more strenuous demands upon him
+who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span> aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than
+ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make
+poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes
+honey. Many of our would-be young poets bring us the crude nectar from
+the fields&mdash;fine descriptions of flowers, birds, sunsets, and so
+on&mdash;and expect us to accept them as honey. The quality of the man
+makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe
+birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn
+greatly.</p>
+
+<p>Dean Swift quotes Sir Philip Sidney as saying that the "chief life of
+modern versifying consists in rhyme." Swift agrees with him. "Verse
+without rhyme," he says, "is a body without a soul, or a bell without
+a clapper." He thinks Milton's "Paradise Lost" would be greatly
+improved if it had rhyme. This, he says, would make it "more heroic
+and sonorous than it is."</p>
+
+<p>Unobtrusive rhyme may be a help in certain cases, but what modern
+reader would say that a poem without rhyme is a body without a soul?
+This would exclude many of the noblest productions of English
+literature.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_3" id="IX_3"></a>BERGSON AND TELEPATHY</h3>
+<p>Bergson seems always to have been more than half-convinced of the
+truth of spiritualism. When we are already half-convinced of a thing,
+it takes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span> but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself into a
+belief in telepathy in this wise: "We produce electricity at every
+moment; the atmosphere is continually electrified; we move among
+magnetic currents. Yet for thousands of years millions of human beings
+have lived who never suspected the existence of electricity."</p>
+
+<p>Millions of persons have also lived without suspecting the pull of the
+sun and moon upon us; or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our
+bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or that the coast of this
+part of the continent is slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the
+earth's crust); or without suspecting the incredible speed of the
+stars in the midnight sky; or that the earth is turning under our
+feet; or that electrons are shooting off from the candle or lamp by
+the light of which we are reading. There are assuredly more things in
+heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, many of which
+we shall doubtless yet find out, and many more of which we shall never
+find out. Wireless messages may be continually going through our
+houses and our bodies, and through the air we breathe, and we never
+suspect them. Shall we, then, infer that the air around us is full of
+spirits of our departed friends? I hope it is, but I fail to see any
+warrant for the belief in this kind of reasoning. It does not lend
+color even to the probability, any more than it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span> does to the
+probability that we shall yet be able to read one another's thoughts
+and become expert mind-readers. Mind-reading seems to be a reality
+with a few persons, with one in many millions. But I cannot therefore
+believe in spiritualism as I believe in the "defeat of the Invincible
+Armada." Fleets have been defeated in all ages. Facts are amenable to
+observation and experiment, but merely alleged facts do not stand the
+laboratory tests.</p>
+
+<p>If memory is not a function of the brain, of what is it a function? If
+"judgment, reasoning, or any other act of thought" are not functions
+of the brain, of what are they the functions? The scientific method is
+adequate to deal with all questions capable of proof or disproof. If
+we apply the scientific or experimental method to miracles, where does
+it leave them? Ask Huxley. Thought-transference is possible, but does
+this prove spiritualism to be true?</p>
+
+<p>I know of a man who can answer your questions if you know the answers
+yourself, even without reading them or hearing you ask them. He once
+read a chemical formula for Edison which nobody but Edison had ever
+seen. I am glad that such things are possible. They confirm our faith
+in the reality of the unseen. They show us in what a world of occult
+laws and influences we live, but they tell us nothing of any other
+world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_4" id="IX_4"></a>METEORIC MEN AND PLANETARY MEN</h3>
+<p>There are meteoric men and there are planetary men. The men who now
+and then flash across our intellectual heavens, drawing all eyes for
+the moment, these I call meteoric men. What a contrast they present to
+the planetary men, who are slow to attract our attention, but who
+abide, and do not grow dim! Poets like Emerson, Whitman, and
+Wordsworth were slow to gain recognition, but the radiance of their
+names grows. I call such a poet as Swinburne meteoric, a poet of a
+certain kind of brilliant power, but who reads him now? Stephen
+Phillips with his "Marpessa" had a brief vogue, and then disappeared
+in the darkness. When I was a young man, I remember, a Scottish poet,
+Alexander Smith, published a "Life Drama," which dazzled the literary
+world for a brief period, but it is forgotten now. What attention
+Kidd's "Social Evolution" attracted a generation or more ago! But it
+is now quite neglected. It was not sound. When he died a few years ago
+there was barely an allusion to it in the public press. The same fate
+befell that talented man, Buckle, with his "Civilization in England."
+Delia Bacon held the ear of the public for a time with the
+Bacon-Shakespeare theory. Pulpit men like Joseph Cook and Adirondack
+Murray blazed out, and then were gone. Half a century ago or more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span> an
+Englishman by the name of M. F. Tupper published a book called
+"Proverbial Philosophy" which had a brief season of popularity, and
+then went out like a rush-light, or a blaze of tissue paper. Novels
+like Miss Sprague's "Earnest Trifler," Du Maurier's "Trilby," and
+Wallace's "Ben Hur" have had their little day, and been forgotten. In
+the art world the Cubists' crazy work drew the attention of the public
+long enough for it to be seen how spurious and absurd it was.
+Brownell's war poems turned out to be little more than brief
+fireworks. Joaquin Miller, where is he? Fifty years ago Gail Hamilton
+was much in the public eye, and Grace Greenwood, and Fanny Fern; and
+in Bohemian circles, there were Agnes Franz and Ada Clare, but they
+are all quite forgotten now.</p>
+
+<p>The meteoric men would not appreciate President Wilson's wise saying
+that he would rather fail in a cause that in time is bound to succeed
+than to succeed in a cause that in time is bound to fail. Such men
+cannot wait for success. Meteoric men in politics, like Elaine and
+Conkling, were brilliant men, but were politicians merely. What
+fruitful or constructive ideas did they leave us? Could they forget
+party in the good of the whole country? Are not the opponents of the
+League of Nations of our own day in the same case&mdash;without, however,
+shining with the same degree<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span> of brilliancy? To some of our
+Presidents&mdash;Polk, Pierce, Buchanan&mdash;we owe little or nothing.
+Roosevelt's career, though meteoric in its sudden brilliancy, will
+shine with a steady light down the ages. He left lasting results. He
+raised permanently the standard of morality in politics and business
+in this country by the gospel of the square deal. Woodrow Wilson,
+after the mists and clouds are all dispelled, will shine serenely on.
+He is one of the few men of the ages.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_5" id="IX_5"></a>THE DAILY PAPERS</h3>
+<p>Probably the worst feature of our civilization is the daily paper. It
+scatters crime, bad manners, and a pernicious levity as a wind
+scatters fire. Crime feeds upon crime, and the newspapers make sure
+that every criminally inclined reader shall have enough to feed upon,
+shall have his vicious nature aroused and stimulated. Is it probable
+that a second and a third President of the United States would ever
+have been assassinated by shooting, had not such notoriety been given
+to the first crime? Murder, arson, theft, peculation, are as
+contagious as smallpox.</p>
+
+<p>Who can help a pitying or a scornful smile when he hears of a school
+of journalism, a school for promoting crime and debauching the manners
+and the conscience of the people?&mdash;for teaching the gentle art of
+lying, for manufacturing news when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span> there is no news? The pupils are
+taught, I suppose, how to serve up the sweepings from the streets and
+the gutters and the bar-rooms in the most engaging manner. They are
+taught how to give the great Public what it wants, and the one thing
+the great Public wants, and can never get enough of is any form of
+sensationalism. It clearly loves scandals about the rich, or anything
+about the rich, because we all want and expect to be rich, to
+out-shine our neighbors, to cut a wide swath in society. Give us
+anything about the rich, the Public says; we will take the mud from
+their shoes; if we can't get that, give us the parings of their
+finger-nails.</p>
+
+<p>The inelastic character of the newspaper is a hampering factor&mdash;so
+many columns must be filled, news or no news. And when there is a
+great amount of important news, see how much is suppressed that but
+for this inelasticity would have been printed!</p>
+
+<p>The professor at the school of journalism says: "I try to hammer it
+into them day after day that they have got to learn to get the
+news&mdash;that, whatever else a reporter can or cannot do, he isn't a
+reporter till he has learned to get the news." Hence the invasion of
+private houses, the bribery, the stealing of letters, the listening at
+key-holes, the craze for photographing the most sacred episodes, the
+betrayals of confidence, that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span> newspapers are responsible for.
+They must get what the dear Public most likes to hear, if they have to
+scale a man's housetop, and come down his chimney. And if they cannot
+get the true story, they must invent one. The idle curiosity of the
+Public must be satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>Now the real news, the news the Public is entitled to, is always easy
+to get. It grows by the wayside. The Public is entitled to public
+news, not to family secrets; to the life of the street and the mart,
+not to life behind closed doors. In the dearth of real news, the paper
+is filled with the dust and sweepings from the public highways and
+byways, from saloons, police courts, political halls&mdash;sordid,
+ephemeral, and worthless, because it would never get into print if
+there were real news to serve up.</p>
+
+<p>Then the advertising. The items of news now peep out at us from
+between flaming advertisements of the shopmen's goods, like men on the
+street hawking their wares, each trying to out-scream the other and
+making such a Bedlam that our ears are stunned.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> This fragment is hardly representative of the attitude of
+Mr. Burroughs toward our worthy dailies, and, could he have expanded
+the article, it would have had in its entirety a different tone. He
+lived on the breath of the newspapers; was always eager for legitimate
+news; and was especially outspoken in admiration of the superb work
+done by many newspaper correspondents during the World War.
+Furthermore, he was himself always most approachable and friendly to
+the reporters, complaining, however, that they often failed to quote
+him when he took real pains to help them get things straight; while
+they often insisted on emphasizing sensational aspects, and even put
+words in his mouth which he never uttered. But the truth is, he valued
+the high-class newspapers, though regarding even them as a two-edged
+sword, since their praiseworthy efforts are so vitiated by craze for
+the sensational.&mdash;C. B.</p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="IX_6" id="IX_6"></a>THE ALPHABET</h3>
+<p>Until we have stopped to think about it, few of us realize what it
+means to have an alphabet&mdash;the combination of a few straight lines and
+curves which form our letters. When you have learned these, and how to
+arrange them into words, you have the key that unlocks all the
+libraries in the world. An assortment and arrangement of black lines
+on a white surface! These lines mean nothing in themselves; they are
+not symbols, nor pictures, nor hieroglyphics, yet the mastery of them
+is one of the touchstones of civilization. The progress of the race
+since the dawn of history, or since the art of writing has been
+invented, has gone forward with leaps and bounds. The prehistoric
+races, and the barbarous races of our own times, had and have only
+picture language.</p>
+
+<p>The Chinese have no alphabet. It is said that they are now accepting a
+phonetic alphabet. The Chinese system of writing comprises more than
+forty thousand separate symbols, each a different word. It requires
+the memorizing of at least three thousand word-signs to read and write
+their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>language. The national phonetic script is made up of sixty
+distinct characters that answer to our twenty-four. These characters
+embrace every verbal sound of the language, and in combination make up
+every word. The progress of China has been greatly hampered by this
+want of an alphabet.</p>
+
+<p>Coleridge says about the primary art of writing: "First, there is mere
+gesticulation, then rosaries, or wampum, then picture language, then
+hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters,"&mdash;the last an evolution
+from all that went before. But there is no more suggestion of an
+alphabet in the sign language of the North American Indian than there
+is of man in a crinoid.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_7" id="IX_7"></a>THE REDS OF LITERATURE</h3>
+<p>A class of young men who seem to look upon themselves as revolutionary
+poets has arisen, chiefly in Chicago; and they are putting forth the
+most astonishing stuff in the name of free verse that has probably
+ever appeared anywhere. In a late number of "Current Opinion," Carl
+Sandburg, who, I am told, is their chosen leader, waves his dirty
+shirt in the face of the public in this fashion:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My shirt is a token and a symbol more than a cover from sun and rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My shirt is a signal and a teller of souls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I can take off my shirt and tear it, and so make a ripping razzly noise, and the people will say, 'Look at him tear his shirt!'<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span></div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I can keep my shirt on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I can stick around and sing like a little bird, and look 'em all in the eye and never be fazed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I can keep my shirt on."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Does not this resemble poetry about as much as a pile of dirty rags
+resembles silk or broadcloth? The trick of it seems to be to take
+flat, unimaginative prose and cut it up in lines of varying length,
+and often omit the capitals at the beginning of the lines&mdash;"shredded
+prose," with no "kick" in it at all. These men are the "Reds" of
+literature. They would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and
+standards upon which literature is founded. They show what Bolshevism
+carried out in the field of poetry, would lead to. One of them who
+signs himself H. D. writes thus in the "Dial" on "Helios":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Helios makes all things right&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">night brands and chokes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">as if destruction broke<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">over furze and stone and crop<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">of myrtle-shoot and field-wort,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">destroyed with flakes of iron,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">the bracken-stone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">where tender roots were sown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">blight, chaff, and wash<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">of darkness to choke and drown.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A curious god to find,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">yet in the end faithful;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">bitter, the Kyprian's feet&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">ah, flecks of withered clay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">great hero, vaunted lord&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">ah, petals, dust and windfall<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">on the ground&mdash;queen awaiting queen."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>What it all means&mdash;who can tell? It is as empty of intelligent meaning
+as a rubbish-heap. Yet these men claim to get their charter from
+Whitman. I do not think Whitman would be enough interested in them to
+feel contempt toward them. Whitman was a man of tremendous
+personality, and every line he wrote had a meaning, and his whole work
+was suffused with a philosophy as was his body with blood.</p>
+
+<p>These Reds belong to the same class of inane sensationalists that the
+Cubists do; they would defy in verse what the Cubists defy in form.</p>
+
+<p>I have just been skimming through an illustrated book called "Noa
+Noa," by a Frenchman, which describes, or pretends to describe, a
+visit to Tahiti. There is not much fault to be found with it as a
+narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the
+figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they
+had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple,
+honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the
+Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all&mdash;a
+refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal
+and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the
+outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and
+the other Ists among the French have turned out. The degenerate
+Frenchman is like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span> our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining,
+and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an odor of dead rats.</p>
+
+<p>I recently chanced upon the picture of a kneeling girl, by one of the
+Reds in art, a charcoal sketch apparently. It suggests the crude
+attempts of a child. The mouth is a black, smutty hole in the face,
+the eyes are not mates, and one of them is merely a black dot. In
+fact, the whole head seems thrust up into a cloud of charcoal dust.
+The partly nude body has not a mark of femininity. The body is very
+long and the legs very short, and the knees, as they protrude from
+under the drapery, look like two irregular blocks of wood.</p>
+
+<p>To falsify or belie nature seems to be the sole aim of these
+creatures. The best thing that could happen to the whole gang of them
+would be to be compelled to go out and dig and spade the earth. They
+would then see what things are really like.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_8" id="IX_8"></a>THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION</h3>
+<p>It is interesting to note that the doctrine of evolution itself has
+undergone as complete an evolution as has any animal species with
+which it deals. We find the germ of it, so to speak, in the early
+Greek philosophers and not much more. Crude, half-developed forms of
+it begin to appear in the eighteenth century of our era and become
+more and more developed in the nineteenth, till they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span> approximate
+completion in Darwin. In Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795 there are
+glimpses of the theory, but in Lamarck, near the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, the theory is so fully developed that it
+anticipates Darwin on many points; often full of crudities and
+absurdities, yet Lamarck hits the mark surprisingly often. In 1813 Dr.
+W. C. Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the Royal Society in
+London that contains a passage that might have come from the pages of
+Darwin. In the anonymous and famous volume called "Vestiges of
+Creation," published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of
+species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution
+theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the
+minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse
+toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again in
+Lamarck, but was repudiated by Darwin.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_9" id="IX_9"></a>FOLLOWING ONE'S BENT</h3>
+<p>I have done what I most wanted to do in the world, what I was probably
+best fitted to do, not as the result of deliberate planning or
+calculation, but by simply going with the current, that is, following
+my natural bent, and refusing to run after false gods. Riches and fame
+and power, when directly pursued, are false gods. If a man
+deliberately says to himself, "I will win these things,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span> he has
+likely reckoned without his host. His host is the nature within and
+without him, and that may have something to say on the subject. But if
+he says, "I will do the worthy work that comes to my hand, the work
+that my character and my talent bring me, and I will do it the best I
+can," he will not reap a barren harvest.</p>
+
+<p>So many persons are disappointed in life! They have had false aims.
+They have wanted something for nothing. They have listened to the call
+of ambition and have not heeded the inner light. They have tried short
+cuts to fame and fortune, and have not been willing to pay the price
+in self-denial that all worthy success demands. We find our position
+in life according to the specific gravity of our moral and
+intellectual natures.</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_10" id="IX_10"></a>NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OLD AGE<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></h3>
+<p>The physiology of old age is well understood&mdash;general sluggishness of
+all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called
+rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing
+hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the
+psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons
+well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert,
+the interest in life unabated. It is the memory <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>that plays the old
+man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and
+experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their
+relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a
+person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he
+remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may
+go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of
+those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them
+from their graves: There was G&mdash;&mdash;; how distinctly he recalls the name
+and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was
+B&mdash;&mdash;, a name only. There was R&mdash;&mdash;, and the memory of the career he
+had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat
+accident; but of his looks, his voice&mdash;not a vestige! It is a memory
+full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls
+his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly&mdash;voice, look,
+manner&mdash;all complete. Others are only names associated with certain
+incidents in school.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand
+into an article, were among the very last things he wrote.&mdash;C. B.</p></div>
+
+<p>Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his
+life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt
+slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then the next moment, away it
+goes again! Or, shall we call it a kind of mental an&aelig;sthesia, or
+mental paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span> something about
+Georgetown, South America. I repeated the name over to myself a few
+times. "Have I not known such a place some time in my life? Where is
+it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" The name seemed like a dream. Then I
+thought of Washington, the Capital, and the city above it, but had to
+ask a friend if the name was Georgetown. Then suddenly, as if some
+chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came!
+Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it?
+(I had lived in Washington for ten years.)</p>
+
+<p>So we say, old age may reason well, but old age does not remember
+well. This is a commonplace. It seems as if memory were the most
+uncertain of all our faculties.</p>
+
+<p>Power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in
+the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we
+octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not
+grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only
+need to focus upon you a little more completely.</p>
+
+<p>Of course both sight and hearing are a little blunted in old age. But
+for myself I see as well as ever I did, except that I have to use
+spectacles in reading; but nowadays the younger observers hear the
+finer sounds in nature that sometimes escape me.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Some men mellow with age, others harden, but the man who does not in
+some way ripen is in a bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what it
+lacks in repose.</p>
+
+<p>To grow old gracefully is the trick.</p>
+
+<p>To me one of the worst things about old age is that one has outlived
+all his old friends. The Past becomes a cemetery.</p>
+
+<p>"As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, "they grow more foolish and
+more wise"&mdash;wise in counsel, but foolish in conduct. "There is no fool
+like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is equally true that there is
+no fool like the young fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to
+middle age.</p>
+
+<p>As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting to collate many wise
+sayings of many wise men on youth and age.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Here followed several pages of quotations from the
+ancients and moderns.&mdash;C. B.</p></div>
+
+<p>Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is
+certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any.
+They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent,
+the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of
+pleasures is gone and another takes its place.</p>
+
+<p>Emerson published his essay on "Old Age" while he was yet in the
+middle sixties, and I recall <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>that in the "Emerson-Carlyle
+Correspondence" both men began to complain of being old before they
+were sixty. Scott was old before his time, and Macaulay too. Scott
+died at sixty-one, Macaulay at fifty-nine, Tennyson at eighty-three,
+Carlyle at eighty-six, Emerson at seventy-nine, Amiel at sixty.</p>
+
+<p>I have heard it said that it is characteristic of old age to reverse
+its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them;
+it revises them. If its years have been well spent, it has reached a
+higher position from which to overlook life. It commands a wider view,
+and the relation of the parts to the whole is more clearly seen....</p>
+
+<p>"Old age superbly rising"&mdash;Whitman.</p>
+
+<p>Age without decrepitude, or remorse, or fear, or hardness of heart!</p>
+
+<h3><a name="IX_11" id="IX_11"></a>FACING THE MYSTERY</h3>
+<p>I wish there were something to light up the grave for me, but there is
+not. It is the primal, unending darkness. The faith of all the saints
+and martyrs does not help me. I must see the light beyond with my own
+eyes. Whitman's indomitable faith I admire, but cannot share. My torch
+will not kindle at his great flame. From our youth up our associations
+with the dead and with the grave are oppressive. Our natural animal
+instincts get the better of us. Death seems the great catas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>trophe.
+The silver cord is loosened, and the golden bowl is broken. The
+physical aspects of death are unlovely and repellent. And the
+spiritual aspects&mdash;only the elect can see them. Our physical senses
+are so dominant, the visible world is so overpowering, that all else
+becomes as dreams and shadows.</p>
+
+<p>I know that I am a part of the great cosmic system of things, and that
+all the material and all the forces that make up my being are as
+indestructible as the great Cosmos itself&mdash;all that is physical must
+remain in some form. But consciousness, the real Me, is not physical,
+but an effect of the physical. It is really no more a thing than "a
+child's curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the night," and as the one is
+evanescent, why not the other?</p>
+
+<p>Nature is so opulent, so indifferent to that we hold most precious,
+such a spendthrift, evokes such wonders from such simple materials!
+Why should she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff of
+myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays down. Her cycles of
+change, of life and death, go on forever. She does not lay up stores;
+she is, and has, all stores, whether she keep or whether she waste. It
+is all the same to her. There is no outside, no beyond, to her
+processes and possessions. There is no future for her, only an
+ever-lasting present. What is the very bloom and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span> fragrance of
+humanity to the Infinite? In the yesterday of geologic time, humanity
+was not. In the to-morrow of geologic time, it will not be. The very
+mountains might be made of souls, and all the stars of heaven kindled
+with souls, such is the wealth of Nature in what we deem so precious,
+and so indifferent is she to our standards of valuation.</p>
+
+<p>This I know, too: that the grave is not dark or cold to the dead, but
+only to the living. The light of the eye, the warmth of the body,
+still exist undiminished in the universe, but in other relations,
+under other forms. Shall the flower complain because it fades and
+falls? It has to fall before the fruit can appear. But what is the
+fruit of the flower of human life? Surely not the grave, as the loose
+thinking of some seem to imply. The only fruit I can see is in fairer
+flowers, or a higher type of mind and life that follows in this world,
+and to which our lives may contribute. The flower of life has improved
+through the ages&mdash;the geologic ages; from the flower of the brute, it
+has become the flower of the man. You and I perish, but something goes
+out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of
+mankind. To what end? Who knows? We cannot cross-question the
+Infinite. Something in the universe has eventuated in man, and
+something has profited by his ameliorations. We must regard him as a
+legitimate product, and we must look upon death<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span> as a legitimate part
+of the great cycle&mdash;an evil only from our temporary and personal point
+of view, but a good from the point of view of the whole.</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+<div class="index">
+<ul class="IX"><li>Adaptation, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Agassiz, Louis, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Alchemy, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Alcott, Amos Bronson, in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_26">26-29</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  on Thoreau, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li>Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Alphabet, the, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>
+
+<li>American people, the, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Amiel, Henri Frederic, <a href="#Page_4">4-6</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li>Arnim, Elisabeth von, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Emerson, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poetry, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</li>
+<li>  on poetry, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>.</li></ul></li>
+
+<li>Art, recent "isms" in, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Audacity, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Aurora borealis, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Batavia Kill, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Beauty, <a href="#Page_98">98-101</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Beecher, Henry Ward, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bent, following one's, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Benton, Myron, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bergson, Henri, his "Creative Evolution," revised estimate of, <a href="#Page_264">264-66</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  and telepathy, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li></ul></li>
+<li>Bettina, Goethe's, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bittern, pumping, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Boldness, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bouton, Deborah, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Bryant, William Cullen, his poetry, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Burns, Robert, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Burroughs, John, chronic homesickness, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Cactus, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  contrasted with Emerson, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</li>
+<li>  correspondence with Emerson, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Webster, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>;</li>
+<li>  as a painter, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
+<li>  Emerson's love and admiration for, <a href="#Page_79">79-82</a>;</li>
+<li>  his style, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Channing, William Ellery, 2d, <a href="#Page_138">138-40</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</li>
+<li>  in Thoreau's Journal, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>City, the, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, quoted, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Contrasts, <a href="#Page_218">218-29</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Country, life in the, <a href="#Page_226">226-28</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Critic, the professional, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Criticism, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>D., H., quoted, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dana, Richard Henry, his "Two Years before the Mast," <a href="#Page_256">256-58</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Dargan, Olive Tilford, quoted, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Darwin, Charles, criticism of his selection theories, <a href="#Page_172">172-89</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193-98</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  his "Voyage of the Beagle," <a href="#Page_189">189-93</a>;</li>
+<li>  his significance, <a href="#Page_198">198-200</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Days, memorable, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Death, thoughts on, <a href="#Page_285">285-88</a>.</li>
+
+<li>De Vries, Hugo, his mutation theory, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Discovery, <a href="#Page_223">223-25</a>.
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Early and late, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li></ul></li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+
+<li>Eating, <a href="#Page_77">77-79</a>.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Edison, Thomas A., <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Electricity, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Emerson, Charles, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Emerson, Dr. Edward W., on Thoreau, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Emerson, Ralph Waldo, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  Journals of, discussed, <a href="#Page_1">1-85</a>;</li>
+<li>  a new estimate of, <a href="#Page_1">1-4</a>;</li>
+<li>  and social intercourse, <a href="#Page_6">6-8</a>;</li>
+<li>  self-reliance, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li>  poet and prophet of the moral ideal, <a href="#Page_9">9-11</a>;</li>
+<li>  his lectures, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;</li>
+<li>  his supreme test of men, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li>
+<li>  his "Days," <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;</li>
+<li>  his "Humble-Bee," <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;</li>
+<li>  "Each and All," <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</li>
+<li>  "Two Rivers," <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Poe, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li>
+<li>  as a reader and a writer, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li>
+<li>  his main interests, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Jesus as a Representative Man, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Thoreau, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li>
+<li>  and John Muir, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li>
+<li>  alertness, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Matthew Arnold, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Lowell, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Alcott, <a href="#Page_26">26-29</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Father Taylor, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
+<li>  occupied with the future, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</li>
+<li>  his "Song of Nature," <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
+<li>  near and far, past and present, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li>  and human sympathy, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
+<li>  "Representative Men," <a href="#Page_33">33</a>;</li>
+<li>  attitude towards Whitman, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>;</li>
+<li>  literary estimates, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Wordsworth, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
+<li>  correspondence with Carlyle, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>;</li>
+<li>  love of nature, <a href="#Page_41">41-43</a>;</li>
+<li>  his book "Nature," <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>;</li>
+<li>  his "May-Day," <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</li>
+<li>  feeling for profanity and racy speech, <a href="#Page_44">44-48</a>;</li>
+<li>  humor, <a href="#Page_45">45-48</a>;</li>
+<li>  thoughts about God, <a href="#Page_48">48-52</a>;</li>
+<li>  attitude towards science, <a href="#Page_52">52-60</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Webster, <a href="#Page_60">60-63</a>;</li>
+<li>  religion, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;</li>
+<li>  self-criticism, <a href="#Page_65">65-67</a>;</li>
+<li>  "Terminus," <a href="#Page_67">67</a>;</li>
+<li>  catholicity, <a href="#Page_67">67-70</a>;</li>
+<li>  on the Bible, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</li>
+<li>  his selection of words, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</li>
+<li>  ideas but no doctrines, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>;</li>
+<li>  his limitations, <a href="#Page_73">73-75</a>;</li>
+<li>  and Hawthorne, <a href="#Page_73">73-75</a>;</li>
+<li>  a painter of ideas, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
+<li>  on eating and the artist, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
+<li>  love and admiration for Carlyle, <a href="#Page_79">79-82</a>;</li>
+<li>  hungered for the quintessence of things, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>;</li>
+<li>  the last result of Puritanism, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li>
+<li>  an estimate of, <a href="#Page_86">86-92</a>;</li>
+<li>  attitude towards poverty, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li>
+<li>  weak in logic, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;</li>
+<li>  passion for analogy, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>;</li>
+<li>  false notes in rhetoric, <a href="#Page_92">92-94</a>;</li>
+<li>  speaking with authority, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>;</li>
+<li>  at the Holmes breakfast, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</li>
+<li>  his face, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>;</li>
+<li>  criticisms of, <a href="#Page_96">96-101</a>;</li>
+<li>  on beauty, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</li>
+<li>  last words on, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>;</li>
+<li>  compared with Thoreau, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</li>
+<li>  intercourse with Thoreau, <a href="#Page_156">156-58</a>;</li>
+<li>  incident related by Thoreau, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>;</li>
+<li>  on Walter Scott, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
+<li>  on oratory, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>;</li>
+<li>  a New England Thomas &agrave; Kempis, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;</li>
+<li>  old age, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Esopus, N. Y., <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ethical standards, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Everett, Edward, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Evolution, and the Darwinian theory, <a href="#Page_174">174-89</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193-98</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  chance in, <a href="#Page_175">175-81</a>;</li>
+<li>  the mutation theory, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>;</li>
+<li>  Bergson reread, <a href="#Page_264">264-66</a>;</li>
+<li>  evolution of the doctrine, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+</ul></li></ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Farm, the home, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fist, the, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Flagg, Wilson, Thoreau on, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Flattery, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Flowers, fadeless, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>Fort Myers, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fox, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Fuller, Margaret, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Genius, and talent, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Germans, the, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Gilchrist, Anne, on Emerson, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</li>
+
+<li>God, Emerson's idea of, <a href="#Page_48">48-52</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  Nature's, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+
+<li>Goethe, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Gray, Eri, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Gray, Thomas, his "Elegy written in a Country Church-yard," <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Grossmont, Cal., <a href="#Page_240">240</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>H. D., quoted, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Hawaiian Islands, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Hawthorne, Nathaniel, and Emerson, <a href="#Page_73">73-75</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Hearn, Lafcadio, quoted, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Heat, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Hermits, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+
+<li>History, the grand movements of, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Homesickness, <a href="#Page_227">227-29</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Howells, William Dean, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  an estimate, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</li>
+</ul></li></ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Insects, hum of, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Invention, <a href="#Page_223">223-26</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>James, Henry, his hypersensitiveness, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li>James, William, quoted, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Journals, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Juvenal, quoted, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Keator, Ike, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Kepler, Johann, quoted, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Kidd, Benjamin, his "Social Evolution," <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Kingsley, Charles, a parable of, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  and Newman, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Knowledge, the Tree of, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Lamarck, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Landor, Walter Savage, Emerson and, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Life, the result of a system of checks and counter-checks, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Lincoln, Abraham, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Loveman, Robert, his poetry, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Lowell, James Russell, in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  criticism of Thoreau, <a href="#Page_104">104-11</a>;</li>
+<li>  love of books and of nature, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>;</li>
+<li>  possessed talent but not genius, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
+<li>  and Whitman, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+</ul></li></ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>McCarthy, John Russell, his poems, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Masefield, John, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Maui, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Meteoric men, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270-72</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Milton, John, "Paradise Lost," <a href="#Page_260">260</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Montaigne, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Moody, William Vaughn, his poetry, <a href="#Page_204">204-07</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Morgan, Thomas Hunt, on Darwin, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Movements, in inert matter, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Muir, John, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Mutation theory, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Natural history, and ethical and poetic values, <a href="#Page_54">54-56</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Natural selection, criticism of the theory, <a href="#Page_178">178-89</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193-98</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Newspapers, <a href="#Page_272">272-74</a>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span></li>
+
+<li>"Noa Noa," <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Old age, the psychology of, <a href="#Page_281">281-85</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Oratory, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on chance in evolution, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Palm and fist, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Pascal, Blaise, quoted, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Permanent, and transient, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Phillips, Stephen, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Phillips, Wendell, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Poe, Edgar Allan, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  Emerson on, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</li>
+<li>  his poetry, <a href="#Page_209">209-11</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Poets, do not efface one another, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Poetry, only the best significant, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  a discussion of, <a href="#Page_201">201-17</a>;</li>
+<li>  B.'s own, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</li>
+<li>  and philosophy, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207-09</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>;</li>
+<li>  not sweetened prose put up in verse form, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;</li>
+<li>  red revolution in, <a href="#Page_276">276-78</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Pope, Alexander, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Positive and negative, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Power, mankind drunk with, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Praise, and flattery, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Prayer, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Quotations, a book of, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Rain, creative function of, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rainbow, the, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rashness, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Reds of literature and art, the, <a href="#Page_276">276-79</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Reed, Sampson, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rhyme, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Ripley, Rev. Dr. Ezra, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Robertson, Frederick William, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rochefoucauld, quoted, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Roosevelt, Theodore, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Sandburg, Carl, quoted, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Santayana, George, quoted, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Scott, Sir Walter, his poems, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sea, the, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sect, a queer, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sexes, the, <a href="#Page_238">238-40</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Shakespeare, William, quoted, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Shelley, Percy Bysshe, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sidney, Sir Philip, quoted, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Smith, Alexander, <a href="#Page_270">270</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Snake, mechanism for crushing eggs, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Snow, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Spanish-American War, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Spencer, Herbert, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Spiritualism, <a href="#Page_267">267-69</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Stanton, Edwin M., <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Stedman, Edmund Clarence, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Style, <a href="#Page_81">81-84</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Sublime, the, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Swift, Jonathan, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Swinburne, Algernon Charles, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Talent, and genius, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Taylor, Edward T., <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Telepathy, <a href="#Page_267">267-69</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Tennyson, Alfred, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  and Whitman, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Theories, absurd, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Thomas &agrave; Kempis, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+
+<li>Thomson, J. Arthur, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Thoreau, Henry D., Journal of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
+<li>  compared with Emerson, <a href="#Page_20">20-22</a>;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span></li>
+<li>  his "Walden," <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</li>
+<li>  "The Maine Woods," <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</li>
+<li>  "Cape Cod," <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</li>
+<li>  Emerson on, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;</li>
+<li>  false notes in rhetoric, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;</li>
+<li>  does not grow stale, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
+<li>  ancestry, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</li>
+<li>  Lowell's criticism of, <a href="#Page_104">104-11</a>;</li>
+<li>  industry, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li>
+<li>  philosophy and life, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</li>
+<li>  accomplishment, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</li>
+<li>  his "Walden," <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</li>
+<li>  humor, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</li>
+<li>  approving of Whitman, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</li>
+<li>  as a nature writer, <a href="#Page_112">112-20</a>;</li>
+<li>  his Journal quoted and criticized, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134-37</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139-61</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163-65</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</li>
+<li>  "Walden" quoted, <a href="#Page_114">114-19</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>;</li>
+<li>  travels, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</li>
+<li>  uniqueness, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</li>
+<li>  and science, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</li>
+<li>  individualism, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>;</li>
+<li>  an extremist, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</li>
+<li>  and civilization, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;</li>
+<li>  compared with Emerson, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>;</li>
+<li>  as a walker, <a href="#Page_127">127-32</a>;</li>
+<li>  his "Walking," <a href="#Page_127">127-29</a>;</li>
+<li>  his natural-history lore, <a href="#Page_133">133-41</a>;</li>
+<li>  faults as a writer, <a href="#Page_141">141-46</a>;</li>
+<li>  love of writing, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>;</li>
+<li>  literary activity, <a href="#Page_153">153-55</a>;</li>
+<li>  personality, <a href="#Page_155">155-59</a>;</li>
+<li>  and the Civil War, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+<li>  and John Brown, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+<li>  inconsistencies, <a href="#Page_160">160-62</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>;</li>
+<li>  his "Life without Principle," <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;</li>
+<li>  idealism, <a href="#Page_162">162-68</a>;</li>
+<li>  manual labor, <a href="#Page_163">163-65</a>;</li>
+<li>  moralizing on Bill Wheeler, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</li>
+<li>  and human emotions, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</li>
+<li>  and young women, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</li>
+<li>  as a philosopher, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</li>
+<li>  merits as a man and a writer, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</li>
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Time, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Timeliness, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Torrey, Bradford, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Town and country, <a href="#Page_226">226-28</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Transient, and permanent, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Truth, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Verse, free, <a href="#Page_276">276-78</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Very, Jones, in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  Emerson's high opinion of, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>"Vestiges of Creation," <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Views, from mountain-tops, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Virgil, quoted, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>Walking, <a href="#Page_127">127-32</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Warbler, night, Thoreau's, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wealth, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Webster, Daniel, Emerson on, <a href="#Page_60">60-63</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  Carlyle on, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Weismann, August, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wells, Dr. W. C., <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Whitman, Walt, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  Emerson on "Leaves of Grass," <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li>
+<li>  in Emerson's Journals, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li>
+<li>  Emerson's attitude towards, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</li>
+<li>  receives "May-Day" from Emerson, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</li>
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>;</li>
+<li>  Thoreau's approval of, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</li>
+<li>  his philosophy, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</li>
+<li>  as a criterion, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>;</li>
+<li>  his faith in himself, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Whittier, John G., <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  and Whitman, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Wilkinson, Garth, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wilson, Woodrow, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Winter, William, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Women, <a href="#Page_238">238-40</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Words, and style, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>.</li>
+
+<li>Wordsworth, William, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>;
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>  Emerson's estimate of, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</li>
+<li>  quoted, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;</li>
+<li>  a poet-walker, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>;</li>
+<li>  on poetry and philosophy, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>;</li>
+<li>  great only at rare intervals, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>.</li>
+</ul></li>
+<li>Wren, cactus, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>.</li></ul>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Harvest, by John Burroughs
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Harvest, by John Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Last Harvest
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: July 25, 2006 [EBook #18903]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST HARVEST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+
+                           THE LAST HARVEST
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+
+                            JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+
+
+
+                         BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+                    The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+                                 1922
+
+
+
+             COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+    _But who is he with modest looks
+      And clad in homely russet brown?
+    He murmurs near the running brooks
+      A music sweeter than their own.
+
+    He is retired as noontide dew,
+      Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
+    And you must love him, ere to you
+      He will seem worthy of your love.
+
+    The outward shows of sky and earth,
+      Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
+    And impulses of deeper birth
+      Have come to him in solitude.
+
+    In common things that round us lie
+      Some random truths he can impart--
+    The harvest of a quiet eye
+      That broods and sleeps on his own heart._
+
+WORDSWORTH
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Most of the papers garnered here were written after fourscore
+years--after the heat and urge of the day--and are the fruit of a long
+life of observation and meditation.
+
+The author's abiding interest in Emerson is shown in his close and
+eager study of the Journals during these later years. He hungered for
+everything that concerned the Concord Sage, who had been one of the
+most potent influences in his life. Although he could discern flies in
+the Emersonian amber, he could not brook slight or indifference toward
+Emerson in the youth of to-day. Whatever flaws he himself detected, he
+well knew that Emerson would always rest secure on the pedestal where
+long ago he placed him. Likewise with Thoreau: If shortcomings were to
+be pointed out in this favorite, he wished to be the one to do it. And
+so, before taking Thoreau to task for certain inaccuracies, he takes
+Lowell to task for criticizing Thoreau. He then proceeds, not without
+evident satisfaction, to call attention to Thoreau's "slips" as an
+observer and reporter of nature; yet in no carping spirit, but, as he
+himself has said: "Not that I love Thoreau less, but that I love truth
+more."
+
+The "Short Studies in Contrasts," the "Day by Day" notes,
+"Gleanings," and the "Sundown Papers" which comprise the latter part
+of this, the last, posthumous volume by John Burroughs, were written
+during the closing months of his life. Contrary to his custom, he
+wrote these usually in the evening, or, less frequently, in the early
+morning hours, when, homesick and far from well, with the ceaseless
+pounding of the Pacific in his ears, and though incapable of the
+sustained attention necessary for his best work, he was nevertheless
+impelled by an unwonted mental activity to seek expression.
+
+If the reader misses here some of the charm and power of his usual
+writing, still may he welcome this glimpse into what John Burroughs
+was doing and thinking during those last weeks before the illness came
+which forced him to lay aside his pen.
+
+CLARA BARRUS
+
+WOODCHUCK LODGE
+
+ROXBURY-IN-THE-CATSKILLS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I.      EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS
+
+II.     FLIES IN AMBER
+
+III.    ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU
+
+IV.     A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN
+
+V.      WHAT MAKES A POEM?
+
+VI.     SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS:
+
+          The Transient and the Permanent
+
+          Positive and Negative
+
+          Palm and Fist
+
+          Praise and Flattery
+
+          Genius and Talent
+
+          Invention and Discovery
+
+          Town and Country
+
+VII.    DAY BY DAY
+
+VIII.   GLEANINGS
+
+IX.     SUNDOWN PAPERS:
+
+          Re-reading Bergson
+
+          Revisions
+
+          Bergson and Telepathy
+
+          Meteoric Men and Planetary Men
+
+          The Daily Papers
+
+          The Alphabet
+
+          The Reds of Literature
+
+          The Evolution of Evolution
+
+          Following One's Bent
+
+          Notes on the Psychology of Old Age
+
+          Facing the Mystery
+
+        INDEX
+
+
+     The frontispiece portrait is from a photograph by Miss Mabel
+     Watson taken at Pasadena, California, shortly before Mr.
+     Burroughs's death.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST HARVEST
+
+I
+
+EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS
+
+I
+
+
+Emerson's fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during
+his lifetime by the books he gave to the world. His Journals,
+published over a quarter of a century after his death, nearly or quite
+double the bulk of his writing, and while they do not rank in literary
+worth with his earlier works, they yet throw much light upon his life
+and character and it is a pleasure to me, in these dark and
+troublesome times,[1] and near the sun-down of my life, to go over
+them and point out in some detail their value and significance.
+
+[Footnote 1: Written during the World War.--C.B.]
+
+Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in
+the moral and religious development of our people, that attention
+cannot be directed to him too often. He could be entirely
+reconstructed from the unpublished matter which he left. Moreover,
+just to come in contact with him in times like ours is stimulating and
+refreshing. The younger generation will find that he can do them good
+if they will pause long enough in their mad skirting over the surface
+of things to study him.
+
+For my own part, a lover of Emerson from early manhood, I come back to
+him in my old age with a sad but genuine interest. I do not hope to
+find the Emerson of my youth--the man of daring and inspiring
+affirmation, the great solvent of a world of encrusted forms and
+traditions, which is so welcome to a young man--because I am no longer
+a young man. Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a
+formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are
+ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit. I find that something one
+gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.
+It is a habit of mind, a test of values, a strengthening of one's
+faith in the essential soundness and goodness of creation. He helps to
+make you feel at home in nature, and in your own land and generation.
+He permanently exalts your idea of the mission of the poet, of the
+spiritual value of the external world, of the universality of the
+moral law, and of our kinship with the whole of nature.
+
+There is never any despondency or infirmity of faith in Emerson. He is
+always hopeful and courageous, and is an antidote to the pessimism and
+materialism which existing times tend to foster. Open anywhere in the
+Journals or in the Essays and we find the manly and heroic note. He
+is an unconquerable optimist, and says boldly, "Nothing but God can
+root out God," and he thinks that in time our culture will absorb the
+hells also. He counts "the dear old Devil" among the good things which
+the dear old world holds for him. He saw so clearly how good comes out
+of evil and is in the end always triumphant. Were he living in our
+day, he would doubtless find something helpful and encouraging to say
+about the terrific outburst of scientific barbarism in Europe.
+
+It is always stimulating to hear a man ask such a question as this,
+even though he essay no answer to it: "Is the world (according to the
+old doubt) to be criticized otherwise than as the best possible in the
+existing system, and the population of the world the best that soils,
+climate, and animals permit?"
+
+I note that in 1837 Emerson wrote this about the Germans; "I do not draw
+from them great influence. The heroic, the holy, I lack. They are
+contemptuous. They fail in sympathy with humanity. The voice of nature
+they bring me to hear is not divine, but ghastly, hard, and ironical.
+They do not illuminate me: they do not edify me." Is not this the German
+of to-day? If Emerson were with us now he would see, as we all see, how
+the age of idealism and spiritual power in Germany that gave the world
+the great composers and the great poets and philosophers--Bach,
+Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, and
+others--has passed and been succeeded by the hard, cruel, and sterile
+age of materialism, and the domination of an aggressive and
+conscienceless military spirit. Emerson was the poet and prophet of
+man's moral nature, and it is this nature--our finest and highest human
+sensibilities and aspirations toward justice and truth--that has been so
+raided and trampled upon by the chief malefactor and world outlaw in the
+present war.
+
+II
+
+Men who write Journals are usually men of certain marked traits--they
+are idealists, they love solitude rather than society, they are
+self-conscious, and they love to write. At least this seems to be true
+of the men of the past century who left Journals of permanent literary
+worth--Amiel, Emerson, and Thoreau. Amiel's Journal has more the
+character of a diary than has Emerson's or Thoreau's, though it is
+also a record of thoughts as well as of days. Emerson left more
+unprinted matter than he chose to publish during his lifetime.
+
+The Journals of Emerson and Thoreau are largely made up of left-overs
+from their published works, and hence as literary material, when
+compared with their other volumes, are of secondary importance. You
+could not make another "Walden" out of Thoreau's Journals, nor build
+up another chapter on "Self-Reliance," or on "Character," or on the
+"Over-Soul," from Emerson's, though there are fragments here and there
+in both that are on a level with their best work.
+
+Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles wondered that he did
+not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate
+habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles
+evidently was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly
+more fond of real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an
+orator and could not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write
+Journals, as I have said, are usually men of solitary habits, and
+their Journal largely takes the place of social converse. Amiel,
+Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely souls, lacking in social gifts, and
+seeking relief in the society of their own thoughts. Such men go to
+their Journals as other men go to their clubs. They love to be alone
+with themselves, and dread to be benumbed or drained of their mental
+force by uncongenial persons. To such a man his Journal becomes his
+duplicate self and he says to it what he could not say to his nearest
+friend. It becomes both an altar and a confessional. Especially is
+this true of deeply religious souls such as the men I have named. They
+commune, through their Journals, with the demons that attend them.
+Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence, "There is but one thing
+needful--to possess God," and Emerson's Journal in its most
+characteristic pages is always a search after God, or the highest
+truth.
+
+"After a day of humiliation and stripes," he writes, "if I can write
+it down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of
+joy, the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given
+me by all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of
+humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end."
+"I write my journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name
+of society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen."
+
+He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. At the age of thirty
+he said he had "no skill to live with men; that is, such men as the
+world is made of; and such as I delight in I seldom find." Again he
+says, aged thirty-two, "I study the art of solitude; I yield me as
+gracefully as I can to destiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a
+settled thing" that he and society shall be "nothing to each other."
+He takes to his Journal instead. It is his house of refuge.
+
+Yet he constantly laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the
+poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and
+of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal
+spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for
+many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run
+for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But he does
+not run away; he often takes it out in hoeing in his garden: "My good
+hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to
+bite my enemies." "In smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my temper.
+In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed
+deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said
+that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him
+resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his
+temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and
+trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no
+longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a
+visitor is by." We welcome these and many another bit of
+self-analysis: "I was born with a seeing eye and not a helping hand. I
+can only comfort my friends by thought, and not by love or aid." "I
+was made a hermit and am content with my lot. I pluck golden fruit
+from rare meetings with wise men." Margaret Fuller told him he seemed
+always on stilts: "It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my
+own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to
+me. Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my speech with
+such. You might turn a yoke of oxen between every pair of words; and
+the behavior is as awkward and proud."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with
+explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and
+agreeable influence stealing like a scent of a flower, or the sight of
+a new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied
+by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose
+thoughts I stimulate."
+
+Here Emerson did center in himself and never apologized. His gospel of
+self-reliance came natural to him. He was emphatically self, without a
+trace of selfishness. He went abroad to study himself more than other
+people--to note the effect of Europe on himself. He says, "I believe
+it's sound philosophy that wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the
+sole object we study and learn. Montaigne said himself was all he
+knew. Myself is much more than I know, and yet I know nothing else."
+In Paris he wrote to his brother William, "A lecture at the Sorbonne
+is far less useful to me than a lecture that I write myself"; and as
+for the literary society in Paris, though he thought longingly of it,
+yet he said, "Probably in years it would avail me nothing."
+
+The Journals are mainly a record of his thoughts and not of his days,
+except so far as the days brought him ideas. Here and there the
+personal element creeps in--some journey, some bit of experience, some
+visitor, or walks with Channing, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Jones Very, and
+others; some lecturing experience, his class meetings, his travels
+abroad and chance meetings with distinguished men. But all the more
+purely personal element makes up but a small portion of the ten thick
+volumes of his Journal. Most readers, I fancy, will wish that the
+proportion of these things were greater. We all have thoughts and
+speculations of our own, but we can never hear too much about a man's
+real life.
+
+Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New
+England, and of English literature generally, as of another order. He
+is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald,
+the poet-seer. He is the poet and prophet of the moral ideal. His main
+significance is religious, though nothing could be farther from him
+than creeds and doctrines, and the whole ecclesiastical formalism.
+There is an atmosphere of sanctity about him that we do not feel about
+any other poet and essayist of his time. His poems are the fruit of
+Oriental mysticism and bardic fervor grafted upon the shrewd,
+parsimonious, New England puritanic stock. The stress and wild,
+uncertain melody of his poetry is like that of the wind-harp. No
+writing surpasses his in the extent to which it takes hold of the
+concrete, the real, the familiar, and none surpasses his in its
+elusive, mystical suggestiveness, and its cryptic character. It is
+Yankee wit and shrewdness on one side, and Oriental devoutness,
+pantheism, and symbolism on the other. Its cheerful and sunny light of
+the common day enhances instead of obscures the light that falls from
+the highest heaven of the spirit. Saadi or Hafiz or Omar might have
+fathered him, but only a New England mother could have borne him.
+Probably more than half his poetry escapes the average reader; his
+longer poems, like "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love," "Monadnoc,"
+"Merlin," "The Sphinx," "The World-Soul," set the mind groping for the
+invisible rays of the spectrum of human thought and knowledge, but
+many of the shorter poems, such as "The Problem," "Each and All,"
+"Sea-Shore," "The Snow-Storm," "Musketaquid," "Days," "Song of
+Nature," "My Garden," "Boston Hymn," "Concord Hymn," and others, are
+among the most precious things in our literature.
+
+As Emerson was a bard among poets, a seer among philosophers, a
+prophet among essayists, an oracle among ethical teachers, so, as I
+have said, was he a solitary among men. He walked alone. He somewhere
+refers to his "porcupine impossibility of contact with men." His very
+thoughts are not social among themselves, they separate. Each stands
+alone; often they hardly have a bowing acquaintance; over and over
+their juxtaposition is mechanical and not vital. The redeeming feature
+is that they can afford to stand alone, like shafts of marble or
+granite.
+
+The force and worth of his page is not in its logical texture, but in
+the beauty and truth of its isolated sentences and paragraphs. There
+is little inductive or deductive reasoning in his books, but a series
+of affirmations whose premises and logical connection the reader does
+not always see.
+
+He records that his hearers found his lectures fine and poetical but a
+little puzzling. "One thought them as good as a kaleidoscope." The
+solid men of business said that they did not understand them but their
+daughters did.
+
+The lecture committee in Illinois in 1856 told him that the people
+wanted a hearty laugh. "The stout Illinoian," not finding the laugh,
+"after a short trial walks out of the hall." I think even his best
+Eastern audiences were always a good deal puzzled. The lecturer never
+tried to meet them halfway. He says himself of one of his lectures, "I
+found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good
+house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." The
+absence of the stairs in his house--of an easy entrance into the
+heart of the subject, and of a few consecutive and leading
+ideas--will, in a measure, account for the bewilderment of his
+hearers. When I heard Emerson in 1871 before audiences in Baltimore
+and Washington, I could see and feel this uncertainty and bewilderment
+in his auditors.
+
+His lectures could not be briefly summarized. They had no central
+thought. You could give a sample sentence, but not the one sentence
+that commanded all the others. Whatever he called it, his theme, as he
+himself confesses, was always fundamentally the same: "In all my
+lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the
+private man. This the people accept readily enough and even with loud
+commendations as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or
+Literature, or the Household, but the moment I call it Religion they
+are shocked, though it be only the application of the same truth which
+they receive everywhere else to a new class of facts."
+
+Emerson's supreme test of a man, after all other points had been
+considered, was the religious test: Was he truly religious? Was his
+pole star the moral law? Was the sense of the Infinite ever with him?
+But few contemporary authors met his requirements in this respect.
+After his first visit abroad, when he saw Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge,
+Wordsworth, and others, he said they were all second-or third-rate men
+because of their want of the religious sense. They all looked
+backward to a religion of other ages, and had no faith in a present
+revelation.
+
+His conception of the divine will as _the eternal tendency to the good
+of the whole, active in every atom, every moment_, is one of the
+thoughts in which religion and science meet and join hands.
+
+III
+
+In Emerson's Journal one sees the Emersonian worlds in their
+making--the essays, the addresses, the poems. Here are the nebulae and
+star-dust out of which most of them came, or in which their suggestion
+lies. Now and then there is quite as good stuff as is found in his
+printed volumes, pages and paragraphs from the same high heaven of
+aesthetic emotion. The poetic fragments and wholes are less promising,
+I think, than the prose; they are evidently more experimental, and
+show the 'prentice hand more.
+
+The themes around which his mind revolved all his life--nature, God,
+the soul--and their endless variations and implications, recur again
+and again in each of the ten printed volumes of the Journals. He has
+new thoughts on Character, Self-Reliance, Heroism, Manners,
+Experience, Nature, Immortality, and scores of other related subjects
+every day, and he presents them in new connections and with new
+images. His mind had marked centrality, and fundamental problems were
+always near at hand with him. He could not get away from them. He
+renounced the pulpit and the creeds, not because religion meant less
+to him, but because it meant more. The religious sentiment, the
+feeling of the Infinite, was as the sky over his head, and the earth
+under his feet.
+
+The whole stream of Emerson's mental life apparently flowed through
+his Journals. They were the repository of all his thoughts, all his
+speculations, all his mental and spiritual experiences. What a
+_melange_ they are! Wise sayings from his wide reading, from
+intercourse with men, private and public, sayings from his farmer
+neighbors, anecdotes, accounts of his travels, or his walks, solitary
+or in the company of Channing, Hawthorne, or Thoreau, his gropings
+after spiritual truths, and a hundred other things, are always marked
+by what he says that Macaulay did not possess--elevation of mind--and
+an abiding love for the real values in life and letters.
+
+Here is the prose origin of "Days": "The days come and go like muffled
+and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say
+nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as
+silently away." In this brief May entry we probably see the inception
+of the "Humble-Bee" poem: "Yesterday in the woods I followed the fine
+humble bee with rhymes and fancies free."
+
+Now and then we come upon the germ of other poems in his prose. Here
+is a hint of "Each and All" in a page written at the age of
+thirty-one: "The shepherd or the beggar in his red cloak little knows
+what a charm he gives to the wide landscape that charms you on the
+mountain-top and whereof he makes the most agreeable feature, and I no
+more the part my individuality plays in the All." The poem, his reader
+will remember, begins in this wise:
+
+    "Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
+    Of thee from the hilltop looking down."
+
+In a prose sentence written in 1835 he says: "Nothing is beautiful
+alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole." In the poem above
+referred to this becomes:
+
+    "All are needed by each one;
+    Nothing is fair or good alone."
+
+In 1856 we find the first stanza of his 'beautiful "Two Rivers,"
+written in prose form: "Thy voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the
+music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee as
+those through Concord plain." The substance of the next four stanzas
+is in prose form also: "Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I
+love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air,
+and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the
+inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in
+summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who
+can hear it"; and so on. In the poem these sentences become:
+
+    "Thou in thy narrow banks are pent:
+    The stream I love unbounded goes
+    Through flood and sea and firmament;
+    Through light, through life, it forward flows.
+
+    "I see the inundation sweet,
+    I hear the spending of the stream
+    Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
+    Through love and thought, through power and dream."
+
+It is evident that Emerson was a severe critic of his own work. He
+knew when he had struck fire, and he knew when he had failed. He was
+as exacting with himself as with others. His conception of the
+character and function of the poet was so high that he found the
+greatest poets wanting. The poet is one of his three or four
+ever-recurring themes. He is the divine man. He is bard and prophet,
+seer and savior. He is the acme of human attainment. Verse devoid of
+insight into the method of nature, and devoid of religious emotion,
+was to him but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. He called Poe
+"the jingle man" because he was a mere conjurer with words. The
+intellectual content of Poe's works _was_ negligible. He was a wizard
+with words and measures, but a pauper in ideas. He did not add to our
+knowledge, he did not add to our love of anything in nature or in
+life, he did not contribute to our contentment in the world--the
+bread of life was not in him. What was in him was mastery over the
+architectonics of verse. Emerson saw little in Shelley for the same
+reason, but much in Herbert and Donne. Religion, in his sense of the
+term,--the deep sea into which the streams of all human thought
+empty,--was his final test of any man. Unless there was something
+fundamental about him, something that savored of the primordial deep
+of the universal spirit, he remained unmoved. The elemental azure of
+the great bodies of water is suggestive of the tone and hue Emerson
+demanded in great poetry. He found but little of it in the men of his
+time: practically none in the contemporary poets of New England. It
+was probably something of this pristine quality that arrested
+Emerson's attention in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He saw in it
+"the Appalachian enlargement of outline and treatment for service to
+American literature."
+
+Emerson said of himself: "I am a natural reader, and only a writer in
+the absence of natural writers. In a true time I should never have
+written." We must set this statement down to one of those fits of
+dissatisfaction with himself, those negative moods that often came
+upon him. What he meant by a true time is very obscure. In an earlier
+age he would doubtless have remained a preacher, like his father and
+grandfather, but coming under the influence of Goethe, Carlyle, and
+Wordsworth, and other liberating influences of the nineteenth century,
+he was bound to be a writer. When he was but twenty-one he speaks of
+his immoderate fondness for writing. Writing was the passion of his
+life, his supreme joy, and he went through the world with the writer's
+eye and ear and hand always on duty. And his contribution to the
+literature of man's higher moral and aesthetic nature is one of the
+most valuable of the age in which he lived.
+
+IV
+
+Apart from the account of his travels and other personal experiences,
+the Journals are mainly made up of discussions of upwards of fifty
+subjects of general and fundamental interest, ranging from art to war,
+and looked at from many and diverse points of view. Of these subjects
+three are dominant, recurring again and again in each volume. These
+are nature, literature, and religion. Emerson's main interests
+centered in these themes. Using these terms in their broadest sense,
+this is true, I think, of all his published books. Emerson was an
+idealist, first, last, and all the time, and he was a literary artist,
+or aimed to be, first, last, and all the time, and in the same measure
+and to the same extent was he a devout religious soul, using the term
+religion as he sometimes uses it, as a feeling of the Infinite.
+
+There are one hundred and seventy-six paragraphs, long and short,
+given to literature and art, and one hundred and sixty given to
+religious subjects, and over thirty given to nature. It is interesting
+to note that he devotes more paragraphs to woman than to man; and more
+to society than to solitude, though only to express his dislike of the
+former and his love for the latter. There are more thoughts about
+science than about metaphysics, more about war than about love, more
+about poetry than about philosophy, more on beauty than on knowledge,
+more on walking than on books. There are three times as many
+paragraphs on nature (thirty-three) as on the Bible, all of which is
+significant of his attitude of mind.
+
+Emerson was a preacher without a creed, a scholar devoted to
+super-literary ends, an essayist occupied with thoughts of God, the
+soul, nature, the moral law--always the literary artist looking for
+the right word, the right image, but always bending his art to the
+service of religious thought. He was one of the most religious souls
+of his country and time, or of any country and time, yet was disowned
+by all the sects and churches of his time. He made religion too
+pervasive, and too inclusive to suit them; the stream at once got out
+of its banks and inundated all their old landmarks. In the last
+analysis of his thought, his ultimate theme was God, and yet he never
+allowed himself to attempt any definite statement about God--refusing
+always to discuss God in terms of human personality. When Emerson
+wrote "Representative Men" he felt that Jesus was the Representative
+Man whom he ought to sketch, "but the task required great
+gifts--steadiest insight and perfect temper; else the consciousness of
+want of sympathy in the audience would make one petulant and sore in
+spite of himself."
+
+There are few great men in history or philosophy or literature or
+poetry or divinity whose names do not appear more or less frequently
+in the Journals. For instance, in the Journal of 1864 the names or
+works of one hundred and seventeen men appear, ranging from Zeno to
+Jones Very. And this is a fair average. Of course the names of his
+friends and contemporaries appear the most frequently. The name that
+recurs the most often is that of his friend and neighbor Thoreau.
+There are ninety-seven paragraphs in which the Hermit of Walden is the
+main or the secondary figure. He discusses him and criticizes him, and
+quotes from him, always showing an abiding interest in, and affection
+for, him. Thoreau was in so many ways so characteristically Emersonian
+that one wonders what influence it was in the place or time that gave
+them both, with their disparity of ages, so nearly the same stamp.
+Emerson is by far the more imposing figure, the broader, the wiser,
+the more tolerant, the more representative; he stood four-square to
+the world in a sense that Thoreau did not. Thoreau presented a pretty
+thin edge to the world. If he stood broadside to anything, it was to
+nature. He was undoubtedly deeply and permanently influenced by
+Emerson both in his mental habits and in his manner of life, yet the
+main part of him was original and unadulterated Thoreau. His literary
+style is in many respects better than that of Emerson; its logical
+texture is better; it has more continuity, more evolution, it is more
+flexible and adaptive; it is the medium of a lesser mind, but of a
+mind more thoroughly imbued with the influence of the classical
+standards of modern literature. I believe "Walden" will last as long
+as anything Emerson has written, if not longer. It is the fruit of a
+sweeter solitude and detachment from the world than Emerson ever knew,
+a private view of nature, and has a fireside and campside quality that
+essays fashioned for the lecture platform do not have. Emerson's pages
+are more like mosaics, richly inlaid with gems of thought and poetry
+and philosophy, while Thoreau's are more like a closely woven,
+many-colored textile.
+
+Thoreau's "Maine Woods" I look upon as one of the best books of the
+kind in English literature. It has just the right tone and quality,
+like Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast"--a tone and quality that
+sometimes come to a man when he makes less effort to write than to
+see and feel truly. He does not aim to exploit the woods, but to live
+with them and possess himself of their spirit. The Cape Cod book also
+has a similar merit; it almost leaves a taste of the salt sea spray
+upon your lips. Emerson criticizes Thoreau freely, and justly, I
+think. As a person he lacked sweetness and winsomeness; as a writer he
+was at times given to a meaningless exaggeration.
+
+     Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of
+     unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon
+     learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word
+     and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild
+     mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow
+     and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for
+     their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and
+     Paris. With the constant inclination to dispraise cities and
+     civilization, he yet can find no way to know woods and
+     woodmen except by paralleling them with towns and townsmen.
+     Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it makes me
+     nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.
+
+     I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, but he
+     does not disclose new matter. I am very familiar with all
+     his thoughts,--they are my own quite originally drest. But
+     if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into
+     circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was
+     created to say. I said to him what I often feel, I only know
+     three persons who seem to me fully to see this law of
+     reciprocity or compensation--himself, Alcott, and myself:
+     and 't is odd that we should all be neighbors, for in the
+     wide land or the wide earth I do not know another who seems
+     to have it as deeply and originally as these three
+     Gothamites.
+
+A remark of Emerson's upon Thoreau calls up the image of John Muir to
+me: "If I knew only Thoreau, I should think cooeperation of good men
+impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth,
+for comfort, and joy?" Then, after crediting Thoreau with some
+admirable gifts,--centrality, penetration, strong understanding,--he
+proceeds to say, "all his resources of wit and invention are lost to
+me, in every experiment, year after year, that I make to hold
+intercourse with his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight
+you with, and the time and temper wasted."
+
+Emerson met John Muir in the Yosemite in 1871 and was evidently
+impressed with him. Somewhere he gives a list of his men which begins
+with Carlyle and ends with Muir. Here was another man with more
+character than intellect, as Emerson said of Carlyle, and with the
+flavor of the wild about him. Muir was not too compliant and
+deferential. He belonged to the sayers of No. Contradiction was the
+breath of his nostrils. He had the Scottish chariness of bestowing
+praise or approval, and could surely give Emerson the sense of being
+_met_ which he demanded. Writing was irksome to Muir as it was to
+Carlyle, but in monologue, in an attentive company, he shone; not a
+great thinker, but a mind strongly characteristic. His philosophy
+rarely rose above that of the Sunday school, but his moral fiber was
+very strong, and his wit ready and keen. In conversation and in daily
+intercourse he was a man not easily put aside. Emerson found him
+deeply read in nature lore and with some suggestion about his look and
+manner of the wild and rugged solitude in which he lived so much.
+
+Emerson was alive to everything around him; every object touched some
+spring in his mind; the church spire, the shadows on the windows at
+night, the little girl with her pail of whortleberries, the passing
+bee, bird, butterfly, the clouds, the streams, the trees--all found
+his mind open to any suggestion they might make. He is intent on the
+now and the here. He listens to every newcomer with an expectant air.
+He is full of the present. I once saw him at West Point during the
+June examinations. How alert and eager he was! The bored and
+perfunctory air of his fellow members on the Board of Visitors
+contrasted sharply with his active, expectant interest.
+
+V
+
+He lived absolutely in his own day and generation, and no contemporary
+writer of real worth escaped his notice. He is never lavish in his
+praise, but is for the most part just and discriminating. Walt
+Whitman is mentioned only thrice in the Journals, Lowell only twice,
+Longfellow once or twice, Matthew Arnold three times, but Jones Very
+is quoted and discussed sixteen times. Very was a poet who had no fast
+colors; he has quite faded out in our day.
+
+Of Matthew Arnold Emerson says: "I should like to call attention to
+the critical superiority of Arnold, his excellent ear for style, and
+the singular poverty of his poetry, that in fact he has written but
+one poem, 'Thyrsis,' and that on an inspiration borrowed from Milton."
+Few good readers, I think, will agree with Emerson about the poverty
+of Arnold's poetry. His "Dover Beach" is one of the first-rate poems
+in English literature. Emerson has words of praise for Lowell--thinks
+the production of such a man "a certificate of good elements in the
+soil, climate, and institutions of America," but in 1868 he declares
+that his new poems show an advance "in talent rather than in poetic
+tone"; that the advance "rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than
+the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a
+new poem, and which is unanalysable, and makes the merit of an ode of
+Collins, or Gray, or Wordsworth, or Herbert, or Byron." He evidently
+thought little of Lowell's severe arraignment of him in a college poem
+which he wrote soon after the delivery of the famous "Divinity School
+Address." The current of religious feeling in Cambridge set so
+strongly against Emerson for several years that Lowell doubtless
+merely reflected it. Why did he not try to deflect it, or to check it?
+And yet, when Emerson's friends did try to defend him, it was against
+his will. He hated to be defended in a newspaper: "As long as all that
+is said is against me I feel a certain austere assurance of success,
+but as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one
+that lies unprotected before his enemies."
+
+Next to Thoreau, Emerson devotes to Alcott more space in his Journals
+than to any other man. It is all telling interpretation, description,
+and criticism. Truly, Alcott must have had some extraordinary power to
+have made such a lasting impression upon Emerson. When my friend Myron
+Benton and I first met Emerson in 1863 at West Point, Emerson spoke of
+Alcott very pointedly, and said we should never miss a chance to hear
+his conversation, but that when he put pen to paper all his
+inspiration left him. His thoughts faded as soon as he tried to set
+them down. There must have been some curious illusion about it all on
+the part of Emerson, as no fragment of Alcott's wonderful talk worth
+preserving has come down to us. The waters of the sea are blue, but
+not in the pailful. There must have been something analogous in
+Alcott's conversations, some total effect which the details do not
+justify, or something in the atmosphere which he created, that gave
+certain of his hearers the conviction that they were voyaging with him
+through the celestial depths.
+
+It was a curious fact that Alcott "could not recall one word or part
+of his own conversation, or of any one's, let the expression be never
+so happy." And he seems to have hypnotized Emerson in the same way.
+"He made here some majestic utterances, but so inspired me that even I
+forgot the words often." "Olympian dreams," Emerson calls his
+talk--moonshine, it appears at this distance.
+
+"His discourse soars to a wonderful height," says Emerson, "so
+regular, so lucid, so playful, so new and disdainful of all boundaries
+of tradition and experience, that the hearers seem no longer to have
+bodies or material gravity, but almost they can mount into the air at
+pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system. I say
+this of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he
+loses, in my judgment, all his power, and I derive more pain than
+pleasure from the perusal." Some illusion surely that made the effort
+to report him like an attempt to capture the rainbow, only to find it
+common water.
+
+In 1842 Emerson devotes eight pages in his Journal to an analysis of
+Alcott, and very masterly they are. He ends with these sentences:
+"This noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more
+such persons to exist."
+
+"When Alcott wrote from England that he was bringing home Wright and
+Lane, I wrote him a letter which I required him to show them, saying
+that they might safely trust his theories, but that they should put no
+trust whatever in his statement of facts. When they all arrived
+here--he and his victims--I asked them if he showed them the letter;
+they answered that he did; so I was clear."
+
+Another neighbor who greatly impressed Emerson, and of whom he has
+much to say, was Father Taylor, the sailor preacher of Boston. There
+is nothing better in the Journals than the pages devoted to
+description and analysis of this remarkable man. To Emerson he
+suggested the wealth of Nature. He calls him a "godly poet, the
+Shakespear of the sailor and the poor." "I delight in his great
+personality, the way and sweep of the man which, like a frigate's way,
+takes up for the time the centre of the ocean, paves it with a white
+street, and all the lesser craft 'do curtsey to him, do him
+reverence.'" A man all emotion, all love, all inspiration, but, like
+Alcott, impossible to justify your high estimate of by any quotation.
+His power was all personal living power, and could not be transferred
+to print. The livid embers of his discourse became dead charcoal when
+reported by another, or, as Emerson more happily puts it, "A creature
+of instinct, his colors are all opaline and dove's-neck-lustre and can
+only be seen at a distance. Examine them, and they disappear." More
+exactly they are visible only at a certain angle. Of course this is in
+a measure true of all great oratory--it is not so much the words as
+the man.
+
+Speaking of Father Taylor in connection with Alcott, Emerson says that
+one was the fool of his ideas, and the other of his fancy.
+
+An intellectual child of Emerson's was Ellery Channing, but he seems
+to have inherited in an exaggerated form only the faults of his
+father. Channing appears to have been a crotchety, disgruntled person,
+always aiming at walking on his head instead of on his heels. Emerson
+quotes many of his sayings, not one of them worth preserving, all
+marked by a kind of violence and disjointedness. They had many walks
+together.
+
+Emerson was so fond of paradoxes and extreme statements that both
+Channing and Thoreau seem to have vied with each other in uttering
+hard or capricious sayings when in his presence. Emerson catches at a
+vivid and picturesque statement, if it has even a fraction of truth in
+it, like a fly-catcher at a fly.
+
+A fair sample of Channing's philosophy is the following: "He persists
+in his bad opinion of orchards and farming, declares that the only
+success he ever had with a farmer was that he once paid a cent for a
+russet apple; and farming, he thinks, is an attempt to outwit God with
+a hoe; that they plant a great many potatoes with much ado, but it is
+doubtful if they ever get the seed back." Channing seems to have
+dropped such pearls of wisdom as that all along the road in their
+walks! Another sample of Channing's philosophy which Emerson thinks
+worthy of quoting. They were walking over the fields in November.
+Channing complained of the poverty of invention on the part of Nature:
+"'Why, they had frozen water last year; why should they do it again?
+Therefore it was so easy to be an artist, because _they_ do the same
+thing always,' and therefore he only wants time to make him perfect in
+the imitation."
+
+VI
+
+Emerson was occupied entirely with the future, as Carlyle was occupied
+entirely with the past. Emerson shared the open expectation of the new
+world, Carlyle struggled under the gloom and pessimism of the old--a
+greater character, but a far less lambent and helpful spirit. Emerson
+seems to have been obsessed with the idea that a new and greater man
+was to appear. He looked into the face of every newcomer with an
+earnest, expectant air, as if he might prove to be the new man: this
+thought inspires the last stanzas of his "Song of Nature":
+
+    "Let war and trade and creeds and song
+    Blend, ripen race on race,
+    The sunburnt world a man shall breed
+    Of all the zones and countless days.
+
+    "No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
+    My oldest force is good as new,
+    And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
+    Gives back the bending heavens in dew."
+
+Emerson was under no illusion as to the effect of distance. He knew
+the past was once the present, and that if it seemed to be transformed
+and to rise into cloud-land behind us, it was only the enchantment of
+distance--an enchantment which men have been under in all ages. The
+everyday, the near-at-hand, become prosaic; there is no room for the
+alchemy of time and space to work in. It has been said that all
+martyrdoms looked mean in the suffering. Holy ground is not holy when
+we walk upon it. The now and the here seem cheap and commonplace.
+Emerson knew that "a score of airy miles will smooth rough Monadnoc to
+a gem," but he knew also that it would not change the character of
+Monadnoc. He knew that the past and the present, the near and the far,
+were made of one stuff. He united the courage of science with the
+sensibility of poetry. He would not be defrauded of the value of the
+present hour, or of the thoughts which he and other men think, or of
+the lives which they live to-day. "I will tell you how you can enrich
+me--if you will recommend to-day to me." His doctrine of
+self-reliance, which he preached in season and out of season, was
+based upon the conviction that Nature and the soul do not become old
+and outworn, that the great characters and great thoughts of the past
+were the achievements of men who trusted themselves before custom or
+law. The sun shines to-day; the constellations hang there in the
+heavens the same as of old. God is as near us as ever He was--why
+should we take our revelations at second hand? No other writer who has
+used the English language has ever preached such a heroic doctrine of
+self-trust, or set the present moment so high in the circle of the
+years, in the diadem of the days.
+
+It is an old charge against Emerson that he was deficient in human
+sympathy. He makes it against himself; the ties of association which
+most persons find so binding seemed to hold him very lightly. There
+was always a previous question with him--the moral value of one's
+associations. Unless you sicken and die to some purpose, why such an
+ado about it? Unless the old ruin of a house harbored great men and
+great women, or was the scene of heroic deeds, why linger around it?
+The purely human did not appeal to him; history interested him only as
+it threw light upon to-day. History is a record of the universal mind;
+hence of your mind, of my mind--"all the facts of history preexist in
+the mind as laws." "What Plato thought, every man may think. What a
+saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he
+can understand." "All that Shakespear says of the king, yonder slip of
+a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself"; and so
+on, seeing in history only biography, and interested in the past only
+as he can link it with the present. Always an intellectual interest,
+never a human or an emotional one. His Journal does not reveal him
+going back to the old places, or lingering fondly over the memories of
+his youth. He speaks of his "unpleasing boyhood," of his unhappy
+recollections, etc., not because of unkindness or hardships
+experienced, but because of certain shortcomings or deficiencies of
+character and purpose, of which he is conscious--"some meanness," or
+"unfounded pride" which may lower him in the opinion of others. Pride,
+surely, but not ignoble pride.
+
+Emerson's expectation of the great poet, the great man, is voiced in
+his "Representative Men": "If the companions of our childhood should
+turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not
+surprise us." On the contrary, I think it would surprise most of us
+very much. It is from the remote, the unfamiliar, that we expect great
+things. We have no illusions about the near-at-hand. But with Emerson
+the contrary seems to have been the case. He met the new person or
+took up the new volume with a thrill of expectancy, a condition of
+mind which often led him to exaggerate the fact, and to give an undue
+bias in favor of the novel, the audacious, the revolutionary. His
+optimism carried him to great lengths. Many of the new stars in his
+literary firmament have quite faded out--all of them, I think, but
+Walt Whitman. It was mainly because he was so full of faith in the
+coming man that he gave, offhand, such a tremendous welcome to "Leaves
+of Grass"--a welcome that cooled somewhat later, when he found he had
+got so much more of the unconventional and the self-reliant than he
+had bargained for. I remember that when I spoke of Walt Whitman to him
+in Washington in 1871 or '72, he said he wished Whitman's friends
+would "quarrel" with him more about his poems, as some years earlier
+he himself had done, on the occasion when he and Whitman walked for
+hours on Boston Common, he remonstrating with Whitman about certain
+passages in "Leaves of Grass" which he tried in vain to persuade him
+to omit in the next edition. Whitman would persist in being Whitman.
+Now, counseling such a course to a man in an essay on "Self-Reliance"
+is quite a different thing from entirely approving of it in a concrete
+example.
+
+In 1840 Emerson writes: "A notice of modern literature ought to
+include (ought it not?) a notice of Carlyle, of Tennyson, of Landor,
+of Bettina, of Sampson Reed." The first three names surely, but who
+is Bettina, the girl correspondent of Goethe, that she should go in
+such a list? Reed, we learn, was a Boston bank clerk, and a
+Swedenborgian, who wrote a book on the growth of the mind, from which
+Emerson quotes, and to which he often alludes, a book that has long
+been forgotten; and is not Bettina forgotten also?
+
+Emerson found more in Jones Very than has any one else; the poems of
+Very that he included in "Parnassus" have little worth. A
+comparatively unknown and now forgotten English writer also moved
+Emerson unduly. Listen to this: "In England, Landor, De Quincey,
+Carlyle, three men of original literary genius; but the scholar, the
+catholic, cosmic intellect, Bacon's own son, the Lord Chief Justice on
+the Muse's Bench is"--who do you think, in 1847?--"Wilkinson"! Garth
+Wilkinson, who wrote a book on the human body. Emerson says of him in
+"English Traits": "There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic
+roll, not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought
+to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality." To bid a man's stock
+up like that may not, in the long run, be good for the man, but it
+shows what a generous, optimistic critic Emerson was.
+
+VII
+
+In his published works Emerson is chary of the personal element; he
+says: "We can hardly speak of our own experiences and the names of
+our friends sparingly enough." In his books he would be only an
+impersonal voice; the man Emerson, as such, he hesitated to intrude.
+But in the Journals we get much more of the personal element, as would
+be expected. We get welcome glimpses of the man, of his moods, of his
+diversions, of his home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see him
+as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a member of a rural
+community. We see him in his walks and talks with friends and
+neighbors--with Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, and
+others--and get snatches of the conversations. We see the growth of
+his mind, his gradual emancipation from the bondage of the orthodox
+traditions.
+
+Very welcome is the growth of Emerson's appreciation of Wordsworth. As
+a divinity student he was severe in his criticism of Wordsworth, but
+as his own genius unfolded more and more he saw the greatness of
+Wordsworth, till in middle life he pronounced his famous Ode the
+high-water mark of English literature. Yet after that his fondness for
+a telling, picturesque figure allows him to inquire if Wordsworth is
+not like a bell with a wooden tongue. All this is an admirable
+illustration of his familiar dictum: "Speak what you think now in hard
+words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,
+though it contradict everything you say to-day."
+
+In the Journals we see Emerson going up and down the country in his
+walks, on his lecture tours in the West, among his neighbors, wherever
+and whenever he goes as alert and watchful as a sportsman. He was a
+sportsman of a new kind; his game was ideas. He was always looking for
+hints and images to aid him in his writings. He was like a bird
+perpetually building a nest; every moment he wanted new material, and
+everything that diverted him from his quest was an unwelcome
+interruption. He had no great argument to build, no system of
+philosophy to organize and formulate, no plot, like a novelist, to
+work out, no controversy on hand--he wanted pertinent, concrete, and
+striking facts and incidents to weave in his essay on Fate, or
+Circles, or Character, or Farming, or Worship, or Wealth--something
+that his intuitive and disjointed habit of thought could seize upon
+and make instant use of.
+
+We see him walking in free converse with his friends and neighbors,
+receiving them in his own house, friendly and expectant, but always
+standing aloof, never giving himself heartily to them, exchanging
+ideas with them across a gulf, prizing their wit and their wisdom, but
+cold and reserved toward them personally, destitute of all feeling of
+comradeship, an eye, an ear, a voice, an intellect, but rarely, or in
+a minor degree, a heart, or a feeling of fellowship--a giving and a
+taking quite above and beyond the reach of articulate speech. When
+they had had their say, he was done with them. When you have found a
+man's limitations, he says, it is all up with him. After your friend
+has fired his shot, good-by. The pearl in the oyster is what is
+wanted, and not the oyster. "If I love you, what is that to you?" is a
+saying that could have been coined only in Concord. It seems to me
+that the basis of all wholesome human attachment is character, not
+intellect. Admiration and love are quite different things.
+Transcendental friendships seem to be cold, bloodless affairs.
+
+One feels as if he wanted to squeeze or shake Emerson to see if he
+cannot get some normal human love out of him, a love that looks for
+nothing beyond love, a love which is its own excuse for being, a love
+that is not a bargain--simple, common, disinterested human love. But
+Emerson said, "I like man but not men."
+
+"You would have me love you," he writes in his Journal. "What shall I
+love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought
+and said? Well, whilst you were thinking and saying them, but not now.
+I see no possibility of loving anything but what now is, and is
+becoming; your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your
+opening thought, your prayer, I can love--but what else?"
+
+Can you not love your friend for himself alone, for his kinship with
+you, without taking an inventory of his moral and intellectual
+qualities; for something in him that makes you happy in his presence?
+The personal attraction which Whitman felt between himself and certain
+types of men, and which is the basis of most manly friendships,
+Emerson probably never felt. One cannot conceive of him as caring
+deeply for any person who could not teach him something. He says, "I
+speculate on virtue, not burn with love." Again, "A rush of thoughts
+is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to me." Pure
+intellectual values seem alone to have counted with Emerson and his
+followers. With men his question was, "What can you teach me?" With
+Nature, "What new image or suggestion have you got for me to-day?"
+With science, "What ethical value do your facts hold?" With natural
+history, "Can I translate your facts and laws into my supernatural
+history?" With civil history, "Will your record help me to understand
+my own day and land?" The quintessence of things was what he always
+sought.
+
+"We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves," Emerson wrote in
+1842, and then added, "We lose time in trying to be like others." One
+is reminded of passages in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence, wherein
+each tried to persuade the other to be like himself. Carlyle would
+have Emerson "become concrete and write in prose the straightest
+way," would have him come down from his "perilous altitude,"
+"soliloquizing on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitude,
+where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness
+and only _the man_ and the stars and the earth are visible--come down
+into your own poor Nineteenth Century, its follies, its maladies, its
+blind, or half-blind but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its
+tears, and try to evolve in some measure the hidden God-like that lies
+in it." "I wish you would take an American hero, one whom you really
+love, and give us a History of him--make an artistic bronze statue (in
+good words) of his Life and him!" Emerson's reply in effect is,
+Cremate your heroes and give me their ashes--give me "the culled
+results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis_,
+a few sentences, hints of the final moral you draw from so much
+penetrating inquest into past and present men."
+
+In reply to Carlyle's criticism of the remote and abstract character
+of his work, Emerson says, "What you say now and heretofore respecting
+the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I
+hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not
+know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal
+right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it
+of the last act of Congress."
+
+VIII
+
+Emerson's love of nature was one of his ruling passions. It took him
+to the country to live, it led him to purchase Walden Pond and the
+Walden woods; it led him forth upon his almost daily walks, winter and
+summer, to the fields and the woods. His was the love of the poet and
+the idealist, of the man who communes with Nature, and finds a moral
+and an intellectual tonic in her works. The major part of his poetry
+is inspired by Nature. He complains of Tennyson's poetry that it has
+few or no wood notes. His first book, "Nature," is steeped in
+religious and poetic emotion. He said in his Journal in 1841: "All my
+thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath
+of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. Shall I not then
+call my little book Forest Essays?" He finally called it "Nature." He
+loves the "hermit birds that harbor in the woods. I can do well for
+weeks with no other society than the partridge and the jay, my daily
+company."
+
+"I have known myself entertained by a single dew-drop, or an icicle,
+by a liatris, or a fungus, and seen God revealed in the shadow of a
+leaf." He says that going to Nature is more than a medicine, it is
+health. "As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel, that
+nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me
+my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing
+on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted
+into the infinite space, I became happy in my universal relations."
+This sentiment of his also recalls his lines:
+
+    "A woodland walk,
+    A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
+    A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
+    Salve my worst wounds."
+
+     If life were long enough, among my thousand and one works
+     should be a book of Nature whereof Howitt's _Seasons_ should
+     not be so much the model as the parody. It should contain
+     the natural history of the woods around my shifting camp for
+     every month in the year. It should tie their astronomy,
+     botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry
+     together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on
+     his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins,
+     bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds
+     of the birch and the oak; in every one of the last is a
+     star. The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river
+     flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this composite,
+     collective beauty which refuses to be analysed. Nothing is
+     beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole.
+     Learn the history of a craneberry. Mark the day when the
+     pine cones and acorns fall.
+
+     I go out daily and nightly to feed my eyes on the horizon
+     and the sky, and come to feel the want of this scope as I do
+     of water for my washing.
+
+     What learned I this morning in the woods, the oracular
+     woods? Wise are they, the ancient nymphs; pleasing, sober,
+     melancholy truth say those untameable savages, the pines.
+
+He frequently went to Walden Pond of an afternoon and read Goethe or
+some other great author.
+
+There was an element of mysticism in Emerson's love of nature as there
+is in that of all true nature-lovers. None knew better than he that
+nature is not all birds and flowers. His love of nature was that of
+the poet and artist, and not that of the scientist or naturalist.
+
+"I tell you I love the peeping of the Hyla in a pond in April, or the
+evening cry of the whippoorwill, better than all the bellowing of all
+the Bulls of Bashan, or all the turtles of all Palestine."
+
+Any personal details about his life which Emerson gives us are always
+welcome. We learn that his different winter courses of lectures in
+Boston, usually ten of them, were attended on an average by about five
+hundred persons, and netted him about five hundred dollars.
+
+When he published a new volume, he was very liberal with presentation
+copies. Of his first volume of poems, published in 1846, he sent
+eighty copies to his friends. When "May-Day" was published in 1867, he
+sent fifty copies to friends; one of them went to Walt Whitman. I saw
+it the day it came. It was in a white dress (silk, I think); very
+beautiful. He sent a copy of his first volume of "Nature" to Landor.
+One would like to know what Landor said in reply. The copy he sent to
+Carlyle I saw in the Scot's library, in Cheyne Row, in 1871.
+
+IX
+
+Emerson was so drawn to the racy and original that it seems as if
+original sin had a certain fascination for him. The austere, the
+Puritanical Emerson, the heir of eight generations of clergy-men, the
+man who did not like to have Frederika Bremer play the piano in his
+house on Sunday, seems at times to covet the "swear-words" of the
+common people. They itch at his ears, they have flavor and reality. He
+sometimes records them in his Journal; for example, this remark of the
+Canadian wood-chopper who cut wood for his neighbor--he preferred to
+work by the job rather than by the day--the days were "so damned
+long!"
+
+The mob, Emerson says, is always interesting: "A blacksmith, a
+truckman, a farmer, we follow into the bar-room and watch with
+eagerness what they shall say." "Cannot the stinging dialect of the
+sailor be domesticated?" "My page about Consistency would be better
+written, 'Damn Consistency.'" But try to fancy Emerson swearing like
+the men on the street! Once only he swore a sacred oath, and that he
+himself records: it was called out by the famous, and infamous,
+Fugitive Slave Law which made every Northern man hound and huntsman
+for the Southern slave-driver. "This filthy enactment," he says, "was
+made in the Nineteenth Century by men who could read and write. I will
+not obey it, by God!"
+
+Evidently the best thing the laboring people had to offer Emerson was
+their racy and characteristic speech. When one of his former neighbors
+said of an eclipse of the sun that it looked as if a "nigger" was
+poking his head into the sun, Emerson recorded it in his Journal. His
+son reports that Emerson enjoyed the talk of the stable-men and used
+to tell their anecdotes and boasts of their horses when he came home;
+for example, "In the stable you'd take him for a slouch, but lead him
+to the door, and when he lifts up his eyes, and looks abroad,--by
+thunder! you'd think the sky was all horse." Such surprises and
+exaggerations always attracted him, unless they took a turn that made
+him laugh. He loved wit with the laugh taken out of it. The genial
+smile and not uproarious laughter suited his mood best.
+
+He was a lover of quiet, twinkling humor. Such humor gleams out often
+in his Journal. It gleams in this passage about Dr. Ripley: "Dr.
+Ripley prays for rain with great explicitness on Sunday, and on Monday
+the showers fell. When I spoke of the speed with which his prayers
+were answered, the good man looked modest." There is another
+prayer-for-rain story that he enjoys telling: "Dr. Allyne, of Duxbury,
+prayed for rain, at church. In the afternoon the boys carried
+umbrellas. 'Why?' 'Because you prayed for rain.' 'Pooh! boys! we
+always pray for rain: it's customary.'"
+
+At West Point he asked a lieutenant if they had morning prayers at
+college. "We have _reveille_ beat, which is the same thing."
+
+He tells with relish the story of a German who went to hire a horse
+and chaise at a stable in Cambridge. "Shall I put in a buffalo?"
+inquired the livery-man. "My God! no," cried the astonished German,
+"put in a horse."
+
+Emerson, I am sure, takes pleasure in relating a characteristic story
+of Dr. Ripley and a thunder-shower: "One August afternoon, when I was
+in the hayfield helping him with his man to rake up his hay, I well
+remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky when the
+thunder gust was coming up to spoil the hay. He raked very fast, then
+looked at the clouds and said, 'We are in the Lord's hands, mind your
+rake, George! we are in the Lord's hands,' and seemed to say, 'You
+know me, the field is mine--Dr. Ripley's--thine own servant.'"
+
+The stories Emerson delighted in were all rich in this quiet humor. I
+heard of one he used to tell about a man who, when he went to his club
+at night, often lingered too long over his cups, and came home
+befuddled in the small hours, and was frequently hauled over the coals
+by his wife. One night he again came home late, and was greeted with
+the usual upbraiding in the morning. "It was not late," he said, "it
+was only one o'clock." "It was much later than that," said the wife.
+"It was one o'clock," repeated the man; "I heard it strike one three
+or four times!"
+
+Another good Emersonian story, though I do not know that he ever heard
+it, is that of an old woman who had a farm in Indiana near the
+Michigan line. The line was resurveyed, and the authorities set her
+farm in Michigan. The old lady protested--she said it was all she
+could do to stand the winters of Indiana, she could never stand those
+of Michigan!
+
+Cannot one see a twinkle in Emerson's eye when he quotes his wife as
+saying that "it is wicked to go to church on Sunday"? Emerson's son
+records that his father hated to be made to laugh, as he could not
+command his face well. Hence he evidently notes with approval another
+remark of his wife's: "A human being should beware how he laughs, for
+then he shows all his faults." What he thought of the loud, surprising
+laugh with which Carlyle often ended his bitter sentences, I do not
+know that he records. Its meaning to Carlyle was evidently, "Oh! what
+does it all matter?" If Emerson himself did not smile when he wrote
+the sentence about "a maiden so pure that she exchanged glances only
+with the stars," his reader, I am sure, will.
+
+Emerson evidently enjoyed such a story as this which was told him by a
+bishop: There was a dispute in a vestry at Providence between two hot
+church-members. One said at last, "I should like to know who you
+are"--
+
+"Who I am?" cried the other,--"who I am! I am a humble Christian, you
+damned old heathen, you!"
+
+The minister whom he heard say that "nobody enjoyed religion less than
+ministers, as none enjoyed food so little as cooks," must have
+provoked the broadest kind of a smile.
+
+Although one of Emerson's central themes in his Journals was his
+thought about God, or his feeling for the Infinite, he never succeeded
+in formulating his ideas on the subject and could not say what God is
+or is not. At the age of twenty-one he wrote in his Journal, "I know
+that I _know_ next to nothing." A very unusual, but a very promising
+frame of mind for a young man. "It is not certain that God exists, but
+that He does not is a most bewildering and improbable Chimera."
+
+A little later he wrote: "The government of God is not a plan--that
+would be Destiny, [or we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore."
+
+He quotes this from Plotinus: "Of the Unity of God, nothing can be
+predicated, neither being, nor essence, nor life, for it is above all
+these."
+
+It was a bold saying of his that "God builds his temple in the heart
+on the ruins of churches and religion."
+
+"A great deal of God in the universe," he says, "but not available to
+us until we can make it up into a man."
+
+But if asked, what makes it up into a man? why does it take this form?
+he would have been hard put to it for an answer.
+
+Persons who assume to know all about God, as if He lived just around
+the corner, as Matthew Arnold said, will not find much comfort in
+Emerson's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate expression
+concerning Him. How can we put the All, the Eternal, in words? How can
+we define the Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds are cast
+in the mould of the finite; our language is fashioned from our
+dealings with a world of boundaries and limitations and concrete
+objects and forces. How much can it serve us in dealing with a world
+of opposite kind--with the Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent,
+and Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines in a bottomless
+sea? How are we to apply our conceptions of personality to the
+all-life, to that which transcends all limitations, to that which is
+everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a local habitation and a
+name to the universal energy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or
+candle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence of the Infinite
+Light. We can deal with the solid bodies on the surface of the earth,
+but the earth as a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms of
+over and under, up and down, east and west, and the like, fail us. You
+may go westward around the world and return to your own door coming
+from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradiction, the sphere a
+surface without boundaries, a mass without weight. When we ascribe
+weight to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of bodies on
+its surface--the pull of the earth is the measure of their weight; but
+the earth itself--what pulls that? Only some larger body can pull
+that, and the adjustment of the system is such that the centripetal
+and centrifugal forces balance each other, and the globes float as
+lightly as any feather.
+
+Emerson said he denied personality to God because it is too little,
+not too much. If you ascribe personality to God, it is perfectly fair
+to pester you with questions about Him. Where is He? How long has He
+been there? What does He do? Personality without place, or form, or
+substance, or limitation is a contradiction of terms. We are the
+victims of words. We get a name for a thing and then invent the thing
+that fits it. All our names for the human faculties, as the will, the
+reason, the understanding, the imagination, conscience, instincts, and
+so on, are arbitrary divisions of a whole, to suit our own
+convenience, like the days of the week, or the seasons of the year.
+Out of unity we make diversity for purposes of our practical needs.
+Thought tends to the one, action to the many. We must have small
+change for everything in the universe, because our lives are made up
+of small things. We must break wholes up into fractions, and then seek
+their common multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We deal with
+God by limiting Him and breaking Him up into his attributes, or by
+conceiving Him under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less
+baffling to us. We can handle Him the better. We make a huge man of
+Him and then try to dodge the consequences of our own limitations.
+
+All these baffling questions pressed hard upon Emerson. He could not
+do without God in nature, and yet, like most of us, he could not
+justify himself until he had trimmed and cut away a part of nature.
+God is the All, but the All is a hard mass to digest. It means hell as
+well as heaven, demon as well as seraph, geology as well as biology,
+devolution as well as evolution, earthquake as well as earth
+tranquillity, cyclones as well as summer breezes, the jungle as well
+as the household, pain as well as pleasure, death as well as life. How
+are you to reconcile all these contradictions?
+
+Emerson said that nature was a swamp with flowers and birds on the
+borders, and terrible things in the interior. Shall we have one God
+for the fair things, and another God for the terrible things?
+
+"Nature is saturated with deity," he says, the terrific things as the
+beatific, I suppose. "A great deal of God in the universe," he again
+says, "but not valuable to us till we can make it up into a man." And
+when we make it up into a man we have got a true compendium of nature;
+all the terrific and unholy elements--fangs and poisons and eruptions,
+sharks and serpents--have each and all contributed something to the
+make-up. Man is nature incarnated, no better, no worse.
+
+But the majority of mankind who take any interest in the God-question
+at all will probably always think of the Eternal in terms of man, and
+endow Him with personality.
+
+One feels like combating some of Emerson's conclusions, or, at least,
+like discounting them. His refusal to see any value in natural science
+as such, I think, shows his limitations. "Natural history," he says,
+"by itself has no value; it is like a single sex; but marry it to
+human history and it is poetry. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus', and
+Buffon's volumes contain not one line of poetry." Of course he speaks
+for himself. Natural facts, scientific truth, as such, had no interest
+to him. One almost feels as if this were idealism gone to seed.
+
+"Shall I say that the use of Natural Science seems merely 'ancillary'
+to Morals? I would learn the law of the defraction of a ray because
+when I understand it, it will illustrate, perhaps suggest, a new truth
+in ethics." Is the ethical and poetic value of the natural sciences,
+then, their main or only value to the lay mind? Their technical
+details, their tables and formulae and measurements, we may pass by,
+but the natural truths they disclose are of interest to the healthy
+mind for their own sake. It is not the ethics of chemical reactions
+and combinations--if there be ethics in them--that arrests our
+attention, but the light they throw on the problem of how the world
+was made, and how our own lives go on. The method of Nature in the
+physical world no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in the
+non-physical, or supersensuous world. But apart from that, it is
+incredible that a mind like Emerson's took no interest in natural
+knowledge for its own sake. The fact that two visible and inodorous
+gases like hydrogen and oxygen--one combustible and the other the
+supporter of combustion--when chemically combined produce water, which
+extinguishes fire, is intensely interesting as affording us a glimpse
+of the contradictions and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature's
+methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in it, let him have it
+who can extract it. The great facts of nature, such as the sphericity
+of the cosmic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual
+interdependence, the unprovable ether in which they float, the blue
+dome of the sky, the master currents of the ocean, the primary and the
+secondary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how they in any way
+illustrate the moral law is hard to see. The ethics, or right and
+wrong, of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no
+validity outside the human sphere. Might is right in Nature, or,
+rather, we are outside the standards of right and wrong in her sphere.
+Scientific knowledge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do not
+go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for rules for the conduct
+of life. We go to these things mainly for the satisfaction which the
+knowledge of Nature's ways gives us.
+
+So with natural history. For my own part I find the life-histories of
+the wild creatures about me, their ways of getting on in the world,
+their joys, their fears, their successes, their failures, their
+instincts, their intelligence, intensely interesting without any
+ulterior considerations. I am not looking for ethical or poetic
+values. I am looking for natural truths. I am less interested in the
+sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The
+significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does
+not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar
+weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for the winter than I am in
+this lesson. I had rather see a worm cast its skin than see a king
+crowned. I had rather see Phoebe building her mud nest than the
+preacher writing his sermon. I had rather see the big moth emerge from
+her cocoon--fresh and untouched as a coin that moment from the
+die--than the most fashionable "coming out" that society ever knew.
+The first song sparrow or bluebird or robin in spring, or the first
+hepatica or arbutus or violet, or the first clover or pond-lily in
+summer--must we demand some mystic password of them? Must we not love
+them for their own sake, ere they will seem worthy of our love?
+
+To convert natural facts into metaphysical values, or into moral or
+poetic values--in short, to make literature out of science--is a high
+achievement, and is worthy of Emerson at his best, but to claim that
+this is their sole or main use is to push idealism to the extreme. The
+poet, the artist, the nature writer not only mixes his colors with his
+brains, he mixes them with his heart's blood. Hence his pictures
+attract us without doing violence to nature.
+
+We will not deny Emerson his right to make poetry out of nature; we
+bless him for the inspiration he has drawn from this source, for his
+"Wood-notes," his "Humble-Bee," his "Titmouse," his "May-Day," his
+"Sea-Shore," his "Snow-Storm," and many other poems. But we must
+"quarrel" with him a little, to use one of his favorite words, for
+seeming to undervalue the facts of natural science, as such, and to
+belittle the works of the natural historian because he does not give
+us poetry and lessons in morals instead of botany and geology and
+ornithology, pure and simple. "Everything," he says, "should be
+treated poetically--law, politics, housekeeping, money. A judge and a
+banker must drive their craft poetically, as well as a dancer or a
+scribe. That is, they must exert that higher vision which causes the
+object to become fluid and plastic." "If you would write a code, or
+logarithms, or a cook-book, you cannot spare the poetic impulse." "No
+one will doubt that battles can be fought poetically who reads
+Plutarch or Las Casas."
+
+We are interested in the wild life around us because the lives of the
+wild creatures in a measure parallel our own; because they are the
+partakers of the same bounty of nature that we are; they are fruit of
+the same biological tree. We are interested in knowing how they get on
+in the world. Bird and bee, fish and man, are all made of one stuff,
+are all akin. The evolutionary impulse that brought man, brought his
+dog and horse. Did Emerson, indeed, only go to nature as he went to
+the bank, to make a draft upon it? Was his walk barren that brought
+him no image, no new idea? Was the day wasted that did not add a new
+line to his verse? He appears to have gone up and down the land
+seeking images. He was so firmly persuaded that there is not a passage
+in the human soul, perhaps not a shade of thought, but has its emblem
+in nature, that he was ever on the alert to discover these relations
+of his own mind to the external world. "I see the law of Nature
+equally exemplified in bar-room and in a saloon of the philosopher. I
+get instruction and the opportunities of my genius indifferently in
+all places, companies, and pursuits, so only there be antagonisms."
+
+Emerson thought that science as such bereaved Nature of her charm. To
+the man of little or no imagination or sensibility to beauty, Nature
+has no charm anyhow, but if he have these gifts, they will certainly
+survive scientific knowledge, and be quickened and heightened by it.
+
+After we have learned all that the astronomers can tell us about the
+midnight heavens, do we look up at the stars with less wonder and awe?
+After we have learned all that the chemist and the physicist can tell
+us about matter--its interior activities and its exterior laws and
+relations--do we admire and marvel less? After the geologist has told
+us all he has found out about the earth's crust and the rocks, when we
+quarry our building-stone, do we plough and hoe and plant its soil
+with less interest and veneration? No, science as the pursuit of truth
+causes light to spring out of the abysmal darkness, and enhances our
+love and interest in Nature. Is the return of the seasons less
+welcome because we know the cause? Is an eclipse less startling
+because it occurs exactly on time? Science bereaves Nature of her
+dread and fearsomeness, it breaks the spell which the ignorance and
+credulity of men have cast upon her.
+
+Emerson had little use for science except so far as it yielded him
+symbols and parables for his superscience. The electric spark did not
+kindle his interest unless it held an ethical fact for him; chemical
+reactions were dull affairs unless he could trace their laws in mental
+reactions. "Read chemistry a little," he said, "and you will quickly
+see that its laws and experiments will furnish an alphabet or
+vocabulary for all of your moral observations." He found a lesson in
+composition in the fact that the diamond and lampblack are the same
+substance differently arranged. Good writing, he said, is a chemical
+combination, and not a mechanical mixture. That is not the noblest
+chemistry that can extract sunshine from cucumbers, but that which can
+extract "honor from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from beggars,
+justice from thieves, benevolence from misers."
+
+Though mindful of the birds and flowers and trees and rivers in his
+walks, it was mainly through his pressing need of figures and symbols
+for transcendental use. He says, "Whenever you enumerate a physical
+law, I hear in it a moral law." His final interest was in the moral
+law. Unless the scientific fact you brought him had some moral value,
+it made little impression upon him.
+
+He admits he is more interested to know "why the star form is so oft
+repeated in botany, and why the number five is such a favorite with
+Nature, than to understand the circulation of the sap and the
+formation of buds." His insight into Nature, and the prophetic
+character of his genius, are seen in many ways, among others in his
+anticipation or poetic forecast of the Darwinian theory of the origin
+of species, in 1853.
+
+"We want a higher logic to put us in training for the laws of
+creation. How does the step forward from one species to a higher
+species of an existing genus take place? The ass is not the parent of
+the horse; no fish begets a bird. But the concurrence of new
+conditions necessitates a new object in which these conditions meet
+and flower. When the hour is struck in onward nature, announcing that
+all is ready for the birth of higher form and nobler function, not one
+pair of parents, but the whole consenting system thrills, yearns, and
+produces. It is a favorable aspect of planets and of elements."
+
+In 1840 he wrote, "The method of advance in Nature is perpetual
+transformation." In the same year he wrote:
+
+"There is no leap--not a shock of violence throughout nature. Man
+therefore must be predicted in the first chemical relation exhibited
+by the first atom. If we had eyes to see it, this bit of quartz would
+certify us of the necessity that man must exist as inevitably as the
+cities he has actually built."
+
+X
+
+How fruitful in striking and original men New England was in those
+days--poets, orators, picturesque characters! In Concord, Emerson,
+Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott; in Boston and Cambridge, Lowell,
+Longfellow, Norton, Holmes, Higginson, Father Taylor, Bancroft,
+Everett, and others, with Webster standing out like a Colossus on the
+New Hampshire granite. This crop of geniuses seems to have been the
+aftermath of the Revolution. Will our social and industrial revolution
+bring anything like another such a crop? Will the great World War
+produce another? Until now too much prosperity, too much mammon, too
+much "at ease in Zion" has certainly prevailed for another band of
+great idealists to appear.
+
+Emerson could never keep his eyes off Webster. He was fairly
+hypnotized by the majesty and power of his mind and personality, and
+he recurs to him in page after page of his Journal. Webster was of
+primary stuff like the granite of his native hills, while such a man
+as Everett was of the secondary formation, like the sandstone rocks.
+Emerson was delighted when he learned that Carlyle, "with those
+devouring eyes, with that portraying hand," had seen Webster. And this
+is the portrait Carlyle drew of him: "As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or
+Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight
+against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous,
+crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows,
+like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown_; the
+mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:--I have not traced as much of
+_silent Berserkir-rage_, that I remember of, in any other man."
+
+Emerson's description and praise and criticism of Webster form some of
+the most notable pages in his Journal. In 1843, when Webster came to
+Concord as counsel in a famous case that was tried there, the fact so
+excited Emerson that he could not sleep. It was like the perturbation
+of a planet in its orbit when a large body passes near it. Emerson
+seems to have spent much time at the court-house to hear and study
+him: "Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get
+settled down to writing until he has well gone from the county. He is
+a natural Emperor of men." He adjourned the court every day in true
+imperial fashion, simply by rising and taking his hat and looking the
+Judge coolly in the face, whereupon the Judge "bade the Crier adjourn
+the Court." But when Emerson finally came to look upon him with the
+same feeling with which he saw one of those strong Paddies of the
+railroad, he lost his interest in the trial and did not return to the
+court in the afternoon. "The green fields on my way home were too
+fresh and fair, and forbade me to go again."
+
+It was with profound grief that he witnessed the decline of Webster's
+political career, owing to his truckling to the Southern proslavery
+element, and to his increasing intemperance. To see the placid,
+transcendental Emerson "fighting mad," flaring up in holy wrath, read
+his criticisms of Webster, after Webster's defection--his moral
+collapse to win the South and his support of the Fugitive Slave Law.
+This got into Emerson's blood and made him think "daggers and
+tomahawks." He has this to say of a chance meeting with Webster in
+Boston, at this period: "I saw Webster on the street--but he was
+changed since I saw him last--black as a thunder-cloud, and
+careworn.... I did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw
+me and would not meet my face."
+
+In 1851 he said that some of Webster's late speeches and state papers
+were like "Hail Columbia" when sung at a slave-auction; then he
+follows with the terrible remark: "The word _liberty_ in the mouth of
+Mr. Webster sounds like the word _love_ in the mouth of a courtezan."
+
+The prizes or fancied prizes of politics seem to have corrupted all
+the great men of that day--Webster, Choate, Foote, Clay, Everett.
+Their "disgusting obsequiousness" to the South fired Emerson's wrath.
+
+XI
+
+The orthodox brethren of his time, and probably of our time also, I
+fancy, could make very little of Emerson's religion. It was the
+religion of the spirit and not of the utilitarian and matter-of-fact
+understanding. It identified man with God and made all nature
+symbolical of the spirit. He was never tired of repeating that all
+true prayers answered themselves--the spirit which the act of prayer
+begets in one's self is the answer. Your prayer for humility, for
+charity, for courage, begets these emotions in the mind. The devout
+asking comes from a perception of their value. Hence the only real
+prayers are for spiritual good. We converse with spiritual and
+invisible things only through the medium of our own hearts. The
+preliminary attitude of mind that moves us to face in this direction
+is the blessing. The soldier who, on the eve of battle, prays for
+courage, has already got what he asks for. Prayer for visible,
+material good is infidelity to the moral law. God is within you, more
+your better self than you are. Many prayers are a rattling of empty
+husks. Emerson says the wise man in the storm prays God, not for
+safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
+
+Although Emerson broke away from all religious forms, yet was there
+something back of them that he always respected, as do we all. He
+relates that one night at a hotel a stranger intruded into his chamber
+after midnight, claiming a share in it. "But after his lamp had smoked
+the chamber full, and I had turned round to the wall in despair, the
+man blew out his lamp, knelt down at his bedside, and made in low
+whispers a long earnest prayer. Then was the relation entirely changed
+between us. I fretted no more, but respected and liked him."
+
+Contrasting his own case with that of so many young men who owed their
+religious training exclusively to Cambridge and other public
+institutions, he says: "How much happier was my star which rained on
+me influence of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious
+sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and
+derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly
+lives and godly deeds of sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was
+itself a culture, an education."
+
+XII
+
+A course of ten lectures which he delivered in Boston in February,
+1840, on the "Present Age" gave him little pleasure. He could not warm
+up, get agitated, and so warm and agitate others: "A cold mechanical
+preparation for a delivery as decorous,--fine things, pretty things,
+wise things,--but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling, no
+transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment." Because he lacked
+constitutional vigor, he could expend only, say, twenty-one hours on
+each lecture, if he would be able and ready for the next. If he could
+only rally the lights and mights of sixty hours into twenty, he said,
+he should hate himself less. Self-criticism was a notable trait with
+him. Of self-praise he was never guilty. His critics and enemies
+rarely said severer things of him than he said of himself. He was
+almost morbidly conscious of his own defects, both as a man and as a
+writer. There are many pages of self-criticism in the Journals, but
+not one of self-praise. In 1842 he writes: "I have not yet adjusted my
+relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too
+young, or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?"
+Later he sighs, "If only I could be set aglow!" He had wished for a
+professorship, or for a pulpit, much as he reacted from the
+church--something to give him the stimulus of a stated task. Some
+friend recommended an Abolition campaign to him: "I doubt not a course
+in mobs would do me good."
+
+Then he refers to his faults as a writer: "I think I have material
+enough to serve my countrymen with thought and music, if only it was
+not scraps. But men do not want handfuls of gold dust but ingots."
+
+Emerson felt his own bardic character, but lamented that he had so few
+of the bardic gifts. At the age of fifty-nine he says: "I am a bard
+least of bards. I cannot, like them, make lofty arguments in stately,
+continuous verse, constraining the rocks, trees, animals, and the
+periodic stars to say my thoughts,--for that is the gift of great
+poets; but I am a bard because I stand near them, and apprehend all
+they utter, and with pure joy hear that which I also would say, and,
+moreover, I speak interruptedly words and half stanzas which have the
+like scope and aim:"
+
+    "What I cannot declare, yet cannot all withhold."
+
+There is certainly no over-valuation in this sentence, made when he
+was sixty-two: "In the acceptance that my papers find among my
+thoughtful countrymen, in these days, I cannot help seeing how limited
+is their reading. If they read only the books that I do, they would
+not exaggerate so wildly." Two years before that he had said, "I often
+think I could write a criticism of Emerson that would hit the white."
+
+Emerson was a narrow-chested, steeple-shouldered man with a tendency
+to pulmonary disease, against which he made a vigorous fight all his
+days. He laments his feeble physical equipment in his poem,
+"Terminus":
+
+    "Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
+    Bad husbands of their fires,
+    Who, when they gave thee breath,
+    Failed to bequeath
+    The needful sinew stark as once,
+    The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
+    But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
+    Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
+    Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
+    Amid the gladiators, halt and numb."
+
+And yet, looking back near the end of his life, he says that
+considering all facts and conditions he thinks he has had triumphant
+health.
+
+XIII
+
+Emerson's wisdom and catholicity of spirit always show in his
+treatment of the larger concerns of life and conduct. How remarkable
+is this passage written in Puritanic New England in 1842:
+
+     I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst of rich,
+     decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well-nigh persuaded
+     to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her friends, who are also
+     my friends, lamented to me the growth of this inclination.
+     But I told them that I think she is to be greatly
+     congratulated on the event. She has lived in great poverty
+     of events. In form and years a woman, she is still a child,
+     having had no experiences, and although of a fine, liberal,
+     susceptible, expanding nature, has never yet found any
+     worthy object of attention; has not been in love, nor been
+     called out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly
+     wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she shall
+     find what she needs, in a power to call out the slumbering
+     religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that the guide who
+     has led her into this path is a young girl of a lively,
+     forcible, but quite external character, who teaches her the
+     historical argument for the Catholic faith. I told A. that I
+     hoped she would not be misled by attaching any importance to
+     that. If the offices of the church attracted her, if its
+     beautiful forms and humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine
+     and St. Bernard, Jesus and Madonna, cathedral music and
+     masses, then go, for thy dear heart's sake, but do not go
+     out of this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an
+     icehouse again of external. At all events, I charged her to
+     pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange
+     thoroughly.
+
+And this on the Church and the common people written the year before:
+
+     The Church aerates my good neighbors and serves them as a
+     somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a clean shirt or a
+     bath or a shampooing. The minister is a functionary and the
+     meeting-house a functionary; they are one and, when they
+     have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the
+     Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in
+     social and public and ideal relations beyond
+     neighborhood,--higher than the town-meeting--to their fellow
+     men. They marry, and the minister who represents this high
+     public, celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and
+     again they are published by his intervention. One of their
+     family dies, he comes again, and the family go up publicly
+     to the church to be publicised or churched in this official
+     sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as it goes. It is
+     homage to the Ideal Church, which they have not: which the
+     actual Church so foully misrepresents. But it is better so
+     than nohow. These people have no fine arts, no literature,
+     no great men to boswellize, no fine speculation to entertain
+     their family board or their solitary toil with. Their talk
+     is of oxen and pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever
+     liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever
+     spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the Church
+     is their fact for such things. It has not been discredited
+     in their eyes as books, lectures, or living men of genius
+     have been. It is still to them the accredited symbol of the
+     religious Idea. The Church is not to be defended against any
+     spiritualist clamoring for its reform, but against such as
+     say it is expedient to shut it up and have none, this much
+     may be said. It stands in the history of the present time as
+     a high school for the civility and mansuetude of the people.
+     (I might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the
+     medium of those superior ablutions described above, only
+     that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Lyceum, as yet
+     an open and uncommitted organ, free to admit the
+     ministrations of any inspired man that shall pass by: whilst
+     the other churches are committed and will exclude him.)
+
+     I should add that, although this is the real account to be
+     given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet
+     it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that
+     it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the
+     woods of New Hampshire to Boston and serves his
+     apprenticeship in a shop, and now opens his own store, to
+     hang up his name in bright gold letters a foot long? His
+     father could not write his name: it is only lately that he
+     could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun shines on
+     it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact
+     in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make
+     it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his
+     son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state:
+     a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this
+     name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he
+     is at least made responsible and thoughtful by his public
+     relation of a seen and aerated name.
+
+     Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life
+     which he meets with; how to do with few and easily gotten
+     things: but let him seize with enthusiasm the opportunity of
+     doing what he can, for the virtues are natural to each man
+     and the talents are little perfections.
+
+     Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.
+
+     Nothing is so young and untaught as time.
+
+How wise is his saying that we do not turn to the books of the
+Bible--St. Paul and St. John--to start us on our task, as we do to
+Marcus Aurelius, or the Lives of the philosophers, or to Plato, or
+Plutarch, "because the Bible wears black clothes"! "It comes with a
+certain official claim against which the mind revolts. The Bible has
+its own nobilities--might well be charming if left simply on its
+merits, as other books are, but this, 'You must,' 'It is your duty,'
+in connection with it, repels. 'T is like the introduction of martial
+law into Concord. If you should dot our farms with picket lines, and I
+could not go or come across lots without a pass, I should resist, or
+else emigrate. If Concord were as beautiful as Paradise, it would be
+as detestable to me."
+
+In his essays and letters Emerson gives one the impression of never
+using the first words that come to mind, nor the second, but the third
+or fourth; always a sense of selection, of deliberate choice. To use
+words in a novel way, and impart a little thrill of surprise, seemed
+to be his aim. This effort of selection often mars his page. He is
+rarely carried away by his thought, but he snares or captures it with
+a word. He does not feel first and think second; he thinks first, and
+the feeling does not always follow. He dearly loved writing; it was
+the joy of his life, but it was a conscious intellectual effort. It
+was often a kind of walking on stilts; his feet are not on the common
+ground. And yet--and yet--what a power he was, and how precious his
+contributions!
+
+He says in his Journal, "I have observed long since that to give the
+thought a full and just expression I must not prematurely utter it."
+This hesitation, this studied selection robs him of the grace of
+felicity and spontaneity. The compensation is often a sense of novelty
+and a thrill of surprise. Moreover, he avoids the commonplace and the
+cheap and tedious. His product is always a choice one, and is seen to
+have a quality of its own. No page has more individuality than his,
+and none is so little like the page of the ordinary professional
+writer.
+
+'Tis a false note to speak of Emerson's doctrines, as Henry James did.
+He had no doctrines. He had leading ideas, but he had no system, no
+argument. It was his attitude of mind and spirit that was significant
+and original. He would have nothing to do with stereotyped opinions.
+What he said to-day might contradict what he said yesterday, or what
+he might say to-morrow. No matter, the spirit was the same. Truth is a
+sphere that has opposite poles. Emerson more than any other writer
+stood for the contradictory character of spiritual truth. Truth is
+what we make it--what takes the imprint of one's mind; it is not a
+definite something like gold or silver, it is any statement that fits
+our mental make-up, that comes home to us. What comes home in one mood
+may not come home in another.
+
+Emerson had no creed, he had no definite ideas about God. Personality
+and impersonality might both be affirmed of Absolute Being, and what
+may not be affirmed of it in our own minds?
+
+The good of such a man as Emerson is not in his doctrines, but in his
+spirit, his heroic attitude, his consonance with the universal mind.
+His thought is a tremendous solvent; it digests and renders fluid the
+hard facts of life and experience.
+
+XIV
+
+Emerson records in his Journal: "I have been writing and speaking what
+were once called novelties, for twenty-five or thirty years, and have
+not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that
+it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from
+any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in
+driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?--they would
+interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school
+follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if
+it did not create independence."
+
+It is never easy to stray far from the master in high moral, aesthetic,
+and literary matters and be on the safe side; we are only to try to
+escape his individual bias, to break over his limitations and "brave
+the landscape's look" with our own eyes. We are to be more on guard
+against his affinities, his unconscious attractions and repulsions,
+than against his ethical and intellectual conclusions, if one may make
+that distinction, which I know is hazardous business. We readily
+impose our own limitations upon others and see the world as old when
+we are old.
+
+Emerson criticized Carlyle because Carlyle was not Emerson, just as
+Carlyle criticized Emerson because he was not Carlyle. We are all poor
+beggars in this respect; each of us is the victim of his own demon.
+Beware of the predilection of the master! When his temperament impels
+him he is no longer a free man.
+
+We touch Emerson's limitations in his failure to see anything in
+Hawthorne's work; they had "no inside to them"; "it would take him and
+Alcott together to make a man"; and, again, in his rather
+contemptuous disposal of Poe as "the jingle man" and his verdict upon
+Shelley as "never a poet"! The intellectual content of Shelley's work
+is not great; but that he was not a poet, in fact that he was anything
+else but a poet, though not of the highest order, is contrary to the
+truth, I think. Limitations like this are not infrequent in Emerson.
+Yet Emerson was a great critic of men and of books. A highly
+interesting volume showing him in this character could be compiled
+from the Journals.
+
+Emerson and Hawthorne were near neighbors for several years. Emerson
+liked the man better than his books. They once had a good long walk
+together; they walked to Harvard village and back, occupying a couple
+of days and walking about twenty miles a day. They had much
+conversation--talked of Scott and Landor and others. They found the
+bar-rooms at the inns cold and dull places. The Temperance Society had
+emptied them. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar in one of them, but
+"was soon out on the piazza." Hawthorne, Emerson said, was more
+inclined to play Jove than Mercury. It is a pleasing picture--these
+two men, so unlike, but both typical of New England and both men of a
+high order of genius, walking in friendly converse along the country
+roads in the golden September days over seventy years ago. Emerson
+always regretted that he never succeeded in "conquering a friendship"
+with Hawthorne, mainly because they had so few traits in common. To
+the satisfaction of silent intercourse with men Emerson was clearly a
+stranger. There must be an interchange of ideas; the feeling of
+comradeship, the communion of congenial souls was not enough.
+Hawthorne, shy, silent, rather gloomy, yet there must have been a
+charm about his mere presence that more than made up for his want of
+conversation. His silence was golden. Emerson was a transcendental
+Yankee and was always bent on driving sharp bargains in the
+interchange of ideas with the persons he met. He did not propose to
+swap horses or watches or jack-knives, but he would swap ideas with
+you day in and day out. If you had no ideas to swap, he lost interest
+in you.
+
+The wisdom of a great creative artist like Hawthorne does not
+necessarily harden into bright epigrammatic sayings or rules for the
+conduct of life, and the available intellectual content of his works
+to the Emersonian type of mind may be small; but his interior, his
+emotional and imaginative richness may much more than make it up. The
+scholar, the sayer of things, must always rank below the creator, or
+the maker of things.
+
+Philosophers contradict themselves like other mortals. Here and there
+in his Journals Emerson rails against good nature, and says "tomahawks
+are better." "Why should they call me good-natured? I, too, like
+puss, have a tractile claw." And he declares that he likes the sayers
+of No better than the sayers of Yes, and that he preferred hard
+clouds, hard expressions, and hard manners. In another mood, or from
+another point of view, he says of a man, "Let him go into his closet
+and pray the Divinity to make him so great as to be good-natured." And
+again, "How great it is to do a little, as, for instance, to deserve
+the praise of good nature, or of humility, or of punctuality."
+
+Emerson's characterization of himself as always a painter is
+interesting. People, he said, came to his lectures with expectation
+that he was to realize the Republic he described, and they ceased to
+come when they found this reality no nearer: "They mistook me. I am
+and always was a painter. I paint still with might and main and choose
+the best subject I can. Many have I seen come and go with false hopes
+and fears, and dubiously affected by my pictures. But I paint on." "I
+portray the ideal, not the real," he might have added. He was a
+poet-seer and not a historian. He was a painter of ideas, as Carlyle
+was a painter of men and events. Always is there an effort at vivid
+and artistic expression. If his statement does not kindle the
+imagination, it falls short of his aim. He visualizes his most subtle
+and abstract conceptions--sees the idea wedded to its correlative in
+the actual world. A new figure, a fresh simile gave him a thrill of
+pleasure. He went hawking up and down the fields of science, of trade,
+of agriculture, of nature, seeking them. He thinks in symbols, he
+paints his visions of the ideal with pigments drawn from the world all
+about him. To call such men as Emerson and Carlyle painters is only to
+emphasize their artistic temperaments. Their seriousness, their
+devotion to high moral and intellectual standards, only lift them, as
+they do Whitman, out of the world of mere decorative art up to the
+world of heroic and creative art where art as such does not obtrude
+itself.
+
+XV
+
+Emerson wonders why it is that man eating does not attract the
+imagination or attract the artist: "Why is our diet and table not
+agreeable to the imagination, whilst all other creatures eat without
+shame? We paint the bird pecking at fruit, the browsing ox, the lion
+leaping on his prey, but no painter ever ventured to draw a man
+eating. The difference seems to consist in the presence or absence of
+the world at the feast. The diet is base, be it what it may, that is
+hidden in caves or cellars or houses.... Did you ever eat your bread
+on the top of a mountain, or drink water there? Did you ever camp out
+with lumbermen or travellers in the prairie? Did you ever eat the
+poorest rye or oatcake with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness? and
+did you not find that the mixture of sun and sky with your bread gave
+it a certain mundane savour and comeliness?"
+
+I do not think Emerson hits on the true explanation of why man feeding
+is not an attractive subject for the painter. It is not that the diet
+is base and is hidden in caves and cellars, or that the world is not
+present at the feast. It is because eating is a purely selfish animal
+occupation; there is no touch of the noble or the idyllic or the
+heroic in it. In the act man confesses his animal nature; he is no
+longer an Emerson, a Dante, a Plato--he is simply a physiological
+contrivance taking in nutriment. The highest and the lowest are for
+the moment on the same level. The lady and her maid, the lord and his
+lackey are all one. Eating your bread on a mountain-top or in the camp
+of lumbermen or with a beautiful maiden in the wilderness adds a new
+element. Here the picture has all nature for a background and the
+imagination is moved. The rye and the oatcake now become a kind of
+heavenly manna, or, as Fitzgerald has it, under such conditions the
+wilderness is Paradise enow. The simple act of feeding does not now
+engross the attention. Associate with the act of eating any worthy or
+noble idea, and it is at once lifted to a higher level. A mother
+feeding her child, a cook passing food to the tramp at the door or to
+other hungry and forlorn wayfarers, or soldiers pausing to eat their
+rations in the field, or fishermen beside the stream, or the haymakers
+with their lunch under a tree--in all such incidents there are
+pictorial elements because the least part of it all to the looker-on
+is the act of eating.
+
+In Da Vinci's "Last Supper" the mere animal act of taking food plays
+no part; the mind is occupied with higher and more significant things.
+A suggestion of wine or of fruit in a painting may be agreeable, but
+from a suggestion of the kitchen and the cook we turn away. The
+incident of some of Washington's officers during the Revolution
+entertaining some British officers (an historical fact) on baked
+potatoes and salt would appeal to the artistic imagination. All the
+planting and reaping of the farmers is suggestive of our animal wants,
+as is so much of our whole industrial activity; but art looks kindly
+upon much of it, shows us more or less in partnership with primal
+energies. People surrounding a table after all signs of the dinner
+have been removed hold the elements of an agreeable picture, because
+that suggests conversation and social intercourse--a feast of reason
+and a flow of soul. We are no longer animals; we have moved up many
+degrees higher in the scale of human values.
+
+Emerson's deep love and admiration for Carlyle come out many times in
+the Journals. No other literary man of his times moved and impressed
+him so profoundly. Their correspondence, which lasted upwards of
+forty years, is the most valuable correspondence known to me in
+English literature. It is a history of the growth and development of
+these two remarkable minds.
+
+I lately reread the Correspondence, mainly to bring my mind again in
+contact with these noble spirits, so much more exalted than any in our
+own time, but partly to see what new light the letters threw upon the
+lives of these two men.
+
+There is little of the character of intimate and friendly letters in
+these remarkable documents. It is not Dear Tom or Dear Waldo. It is
+Dear Emerson or Dear Carlyle. They are not letters, they are epistles,
+like Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, or to the Thessalonians, or to
+the Romans. Each of them contains the fragments of a gospel that both
+were preaching, each in his own way, but at bottom the same--the
+beauty and majesty of the moral law. Let the heavens fall, the moral
+law and our duty to God and man will stand. These two men, so
+different in character and temperament, were instantly drawn together
+by that magnet--the moral sentiment. Carlyle's works were occupied
+almost entirely with men--with history, biography, political events,
+and government; Emerson's with ideas, nature, and poetry; yet the bed
+rock in each was the same. Both preached an evangel, but how
+different!
+
+Emerson makes a note of the days on which he received a letter from,
+or wrote one to, his great Scottish friend. Both were important events
+with him. It is evident that Emerson makes more of an effort to write
+his best in these letters than does Carlyle. Carlyle tosses his off
+with more ease and unconscious mastery. The exchange is always in
+favor of the Scot. Carlyle was, of course, the more prodigious
+personality, and had the advantage in the richness and venerableness
+of the Old World setting. But Emerson did not hesitate to discount him
+in his letters and in his Journals, very wisely sometimes, not so
+wisely at others.
+
+"O Carlyle, the merit of glass is not to be seen, but to be seen
+through; but every crystal and lamina of the Carlyle glass is
+visible." Of course Carlyle might reply that stained glass has other
+merits than transparency, or he might ask: Why should an author's
+style be compared to glass anyhow, since it is impossible to
+dissociate it from the matter of his discourse? It is not merely to
+reveal truth; it is also to enhance its beauty. There is the charm and
+witchery of style, as in Emerson's own best pages, as well as the
+worth of the subject-matter. Is it not true that in the description of
+any natural object or scene or event we want something more than to
+see it through a perfectly transparent medium? We want the added charm
+or illusion of the writer's own way of seeing it, the hue of his own
+spirit.
+
+I think we may admit all this--doubtless Emerson would admit it--and
+yet urge that Carlyle's style had many faults of the kind Emerson
+indicated. It thrusts itself too much upon the reader's attention. His
+prose is at the best, as in the "Life of Stirling," when it is most
+transparent and freest from mannerisms. Carlyle's manner at its best
+is very pleasing; at its worst it becomes a wearisome mannerism. When
+a writer's style gets into a rut his reader is not happy. Ease,
+flexibility, transparency, though it be colored transparency, are
+among the merits we want.
+
+The most just and penetrating thing Emerson ever said about Carlyle is
+recorded in his Journal in 1847: "In Carlyle, as in Byron, one is much
+more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly
+superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits
+all the time. There is more character than intellect in every
+sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." Criticism like
+this carries the force and conviction of a scientific analysis.
+
+The Journals abound in similar illuminating bits of criticism directed
+to nearly all the more noted authors of English literature, past and
+present. In science we do want an absolutely colorless, transparent
+medium, but in literature the personality of the writer is everything.
+The born writer gives us facts and ideas steeped in his own quality as
+a man. Take out of Carlyle's works, or out of Emerson's, or out of
+Arnold's, the savor of the man's inborn quality--the savor of that
+which acts over and above his will--and we have robbed them of their
+distinctive quality. Literature is always truth of some sort, plus a
+man. No one knew this better than Emerson himself. Another remark of
+Emerson's, made when he was twenty-seven years old, has high literary
+value:
+
+"There is no beauty in words except in their collocation."
+
+It is not beautiful words that make beautiful poetry, or beautiful
+prose, but ordinary words beautifully arranged. The writer who hopes
+by fine language to invoke fine ideas is asking the tailor to turn him
+out a fine man. First get your great idea, and you will find it is
+already fitly clothed. The image of the clothes in this connection is,
+of course, a very inadequate and misleading one, since language is the
+thought or its vital integument, and not merely its garment. We often
+praise a writer for his choice of words, and Emerson himself says in
+the same paragraph from which I quote the above: "No man can write
+well who thinks there is no choice of words for him." There is always
+a right word and every other than that is wrong. There is always the
+best word, or the best succession of words to give force and vividness
+to the idea. All painters use the same colors, all musicians use the
+same notes, all sculptors use the same marble, all architects use the
+same materials and all writers use essentially the same words, their
+arrangement and combination alone making the difference in the various
+products. Nature uses the same elements in her endless variety of
+living things; their different arrangement and combinations, and some
+interior necessity which we have to call the animating principle, is
+the secret of the individuality of each.
+
+Of course we think in words or images, and no man can tell which is
+first, or if there is any first in such matters--the thought or the
+word--any more than the biochemist can tell us which is first in the
+living body, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, or the living
+force that weaves itself a corporeal garment out of these elements.
+
+XVI
+
+Emerson hungered for the quintessence of things, their last
+concentrated, intensified meanings, for the pith and marrow of men and
+events, and not for their body and bulk. He wanted the ottar of roses
+and not a rose garden, the diamond and not a mountain of carbon. This
+bent gives a peculiar beauty and stimulus to his writings, while at
+the same time it makes the reader crave a little more body and
+substance. The succulent leaf and stalk of certain garden vegetables
+is better to one's liking than the more pungent seed. If Emerson
+could only have given us the essence of Father Taylor's copious,
+eloquent, flesh-and-blood discourses, how it would have delighted us!
+or if he could only have got the silver out of Alcott's bewitching
+moonshine--that would have been worth while!
+
+But why wish Emerson had been some other than he was? He was at least
+the quintessence of New England Puritanism, its last and deepest
+meaning and result, lifted into the regions of ethics and aesthetics.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FLIES IN AMBER
+
+
+It has been the fashion among our younger writers to speak slightingly
+and flippantly of Emerson, referring to him as outworn, and as the
+apostle of the obvious. This view is more discreditable to the young
+people than is their criticism damaging to Emerson. It can make little
+difference to Emerson's fame, but it would be much more becoming in
+our young writers to garland his name with flowers than to utter these
+harsh verdicts.
+
+It is undoubtedly true that Emerson entered into and influenced the
+lives of more choice spirits, both men and women, during the past
+generation than did any other American author. Whether he still does
+so would be interesting to know. We who have felt his tonic and
+inspiring influence can but hope so. Yet how impossible he seems in
+times like these in which we live, when the stars of the highest
+heaven of the spirit which illumine his page are so obscured or
+blotted out by the dust and the fog of our hurrying, materialistic
+age! Try to think of Emerson spending a winter going about the Western
+States reading to miscellaneous audiences essays like those that now
+make up his later volumes. What chance would he stand, even in
+university towns, as against the "movies" (a word so ugly I hesitate
+to write it) in the next street?
+
+I once defended Emerson against a criticism of Matthew Arnold's. It is
+true, as Arnold says, that Emerson is not a great writer, except on
+rare occasions. Now and then, especially in his earlier essays, there
+is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution,
+growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph
+follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a
+kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the
+incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read
+as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon
+became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned
+argument. Pictures and parables and startling affirmations suited
+better. Emerson did not stoop to his audience; there was no
+condescension in him. The last time I heard him, which was in
+Washington in the early seventies, his theme was "Manners," and much
+of it passed over the heads of his audience.
+
+Certain of Emerson's works must strike the average reader, when he
+first looks into them, as a curious medley of sense and wild
+extravagance, utterly lacking in the logical sequence of the best
+prose, and often verging on the futile and the absurd. Yet if one does
+not get discouraged, one will soon see running through them veins of
+the purest gold of the spirit, and insight into Nature's ways, that
+redeem and more than redeem them.
+
+I recall that when, as a young man, I looked into them the first time,
+I could make nothing of them. I was fresh from reading the standard
+essayists and philosophers of English literature--Addison, Steele,
+Cowley, Johnson, Locke--and the poems of Pope, Young, and Cowper, all
+of ethical import and value, and sometimes didactic, but never
+mystical and transcendental, and the plunge into Emerson was a leap
+into a strange world. But a few years later, when I opened his essays
+again, they were like spring-water to parched lips. Now, in my old
+age, I go back to him with a half-sad pleasure, as one goes back to
+the scenes of one's youth.
+
+Emerson taught us a mingled poetic and prophetic way of looking at
+things that stays with us. The talented English woman Anne Gilchrist
+said we had outgrown Emerson; had absorbed all he had to give us; and
+were leaving him behind. Of course he was always a teacher and
+preacher, in the thrall of his priestly inheritance, and to that
+extent we leave him behind as we do not leave behind works of pure
+literature.
+
+As to continuity, some of his essays have much more of it than others.
+In his "Nature" the theme is unfolded, there is growth and evolution;
+and his first and second series of Essays likewise show it. The essays
+on "Character," on "Self-Reliance," on the "Over-Soul," meet the
+requirements of sound prose. And if there is any sounder prose than
+can be found in his "Nature," or in his "English Traits," or in his
+historical and biographical addresses, I do not know where to find it.
+How flat and commonplace seem the works of some of the masters of
+prose to whom Arnold alludes--Cicero, Voltaire, Addison,
+Swift--compared with those of Emerson! A difference like that between
+the prismatic hues of raindrops suspended from a twig or a trellis in
+the sunlight and the water in the spring or the brook.
+
+But in Emerson's later work there is, as geologists say, nonconformity
+between the strata which make up his paragraphs. There is only
+juxtaposition. Among his later papers the one on "Wealth" flows along
+much more than the one on "Fate." Emerson believed in wealth. Poverty
+did not attract him. It was not suited to his cast of mind. Poverty
+was humiliating. Emerson accumulated a fortune, and it added to his
+self-respect. Thoreau's pride in his poverty must have made Emerson
+shiver.
+
+Although Arnold refused to see in Emerson a great writer, he did admit
+that he was eminent as the "friend and aider of those who would live in
+the spirit"; but Arnold apparently overlooked the fact that, devoid of
+the merit of good literature, no man's writings could have high
+spiritual value. Strip the Bible of its excellence as literature, and
+you have let out its life-blood. Literature is not a varnish or a
+polish. It is not a wardrobe. It is the result of a vital, imaginative
+relation of the man to his subject. And Emerson's subject-matter at its
+best always partakes of the texture of his own mind. It is admitted that
+there are times when his writing lacks organization,--the vital
+ties,--when his rhetoric is more like a rocking-horse or a
+merry-go-round than like the real thing. But there are few writers who
+do not mark time now and then, and Emerson is no exception; and I
+contend that at his best his work has the sequence and evolution of all
+great prose. And yet, let me say that if Emerson's power and influence
+depended upon his logic, he would be easily disposed of. Fortunately
+they do not. They depend, let me repeat, upon his spiritual power and
+insight, and the minor defects I am pointing out are only like flies in
+amber.
+
+He thought in images more strictly than any other contemporary writer,
+and was often desperately hard-put to it to make his thought wed his
+image. He confessed that he did not know how to argue, and that he
+could only say what he saw. But he had spiritual vision; we cannot
+deny this, though we do deny him logical penetration. I doubt if
+there ever was a writer of such wide and lasting influence as Emerson,
+in whom the logical sense was so feeble and shadowy. He had in this
+respect a feminine instead of a masculine mind, an intuitional instead
+of a reasoning one. It made up in audacious, often extravagant,
+affirmations what it lacked in syllogistic strength. The logical mind,
+with its sense of fitness and proportion, does not strain or
+over-strain the thread that knits the parts together. It does not jump
+to conclusions, but reaches them step by step. The flesh and blood of
+feeling and sentiment may clothe the obscure framework of logic, but
+the logic is there all the same. Emerson's mind was as devoid of
+logical sense as are our remembered dreams, or as Christian Science is
+of science. He said that truth ceased to be such when polemically
+stated. Occasionally he amplifies and unfolds an idea, as in the
+essays already mentioned, but generally his argument is a rope of
+sand. Its strength is the strength of the separate particles. He is
+perpetually hooking things together that do not go together. It is
+like putting an apple on a pumpkin vine, or an acorn on a hickory. "A
+club foot and a club wit." "Why should we fear," he says, "to be
+crushed by the same elements--we who are made up of the same
+elements?" But were we void of fear, we should be crushed much oftener
+than we are. The electricity in our bodies does not prevent us from
+being struck by lightning, nor the fluids in our bodies prevent the
+waters from drowning us, nor the carbon in our bodies prevent carbon
+dioxide from poisoning us.
+
+One of Emerson's faults as a writer arose from his fierce hunger for
+analogy. "I would rather have a good symbol of my thought," he
+confesses, "than the suffrage of Kant or of Plato." "All thinking is
+analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy." His passion
+for analogy betrays him here and there in his Journals, as in this
+passage: "The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does fire
+or wind or tree. Neither does a noble natural man," and so forth. If
+water and fire and wind and tree were in the habit of talking of
+anything else, this kind of a comparison would not seem so spurious.
+
+A false note in rhetoric like the above you will find in Emerson
+oftener than a false note in taste. I find but one such in the
+Journals: "As soon as a man gets his suction-hose down into the great
+deep, he belongs to no age, but is an eternal man." That I call an
+ignoble image, and one cannot conceive of Emerson himself printing
+such a passage.
+
+We hear it said that Whittier is the typical poet of New England. It
+may be so, but Emerson is much the greater poet. Emerson is a poet of
+the world, while Whittier's work is hardly known abroad at all.
+Emerson is known wherever the English language is spoken. Not that
+Emerson is in any sense a popular poet, such as, for example, Burns or
+Byron, but he is the poet of the choice few, of those who seek poetry
+that has some intellectual or spiritual content. Whittier wrote many
+happy descriptions of New England scenes and seasons. "The Tent on the
+Beach" and "Snow-Bound" come readily to mind; "The Playmate" is a
+sweet poem, full of tender and human affection, but not a great poem.
+Whittier had no profundity. Is not a Quaker poet necessarily narrow?
+Whittier gave voice to the New England detestation of slavery, but by
+no means so forcibly and profoundly as did Emerson. He had a theology,
+but not a philosophy. I wonder if his poems are still read.
+
+In his chapter called "Considerations by the Way," Emerson strikes
+this curious false note in his rhetoric: "We have a right to be here
+or we should not be here. We have the same right to be here that Cape
+Cod and Sandy Hook have to be there." As if Cape Cod or Cape Horn or
+Sandy Hook had any "rights"! This comparison of man with inanimate
+things occurs in both Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau sins in this way at
+least once when he talks of the Attic wit of burning thorns and
+briars. There is a similar false note in such a careful writer as Dean
+Swift. He says to his young poet, "You are ever to try a good poem as
+you would a sound pipkin, and if it rings well upon the knuckle, be
+sure there is no flaw in it." Whitman compares himself with an
+inanimate thing in the line:
+
+    "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by."
+
+But he claims no moral or human attributes or rights for his level; it
+simply acts in obedience to the principle it embodies--the law of
+gravitation.
+
+The lecturer "gets away" with such things better than the writer. An
+audience is not critical about such matters, but the reader takes note
+of them. Mosaics will do on the platform, or in the pulpit, but will
+not bear the nearer view of the study.
+
+The incongruities of Emerson are seen in such passages as this: "Each
+plant has its parasites, and each created thing its lover and poet,"
+as if there were any relation between the two clauses of this
+sentence--between parasites and lovers and poets! As if one should
+say, "Woodchucks are often alive with fleas, and our fruit trees bloom
+in May."
+
+Emerson was so emboldened by what had been achieved through the
+mastery of the earth's forces that he was led to say that "a wise
+geology shall yet make the earthquake harmless, and the volcano an
+agricultural resource." But this seems expecting too much. We have
+harnessed the lightnings, but the earthquake is too deep and too
+mighty for us. It is a steed upon which we cannot lay our hands. The
+volcano we may draw upon for heat and steam, as we do upon the winds
+and streams for power, but it is utterly beyond our control. The
+bending of the earth's crust beneath the great atmospheric waves is
+something we cannot bridle. The tides by sea as by land are beyond us.
+
+Emerson had the mind of the prophet and the seer, and was given to
+bold affirmations. The old Biblical distinction between the scribes
+and the man who speaks with authority still holds. We may say of all
+other New England essayists and poets--Lowell, Whipple, Tuckerman,
+Holmes, Hillard, Whittier, Longfellow--that they are scribes only.
+Emerson alone speaks as one having authority--the authority of the
+spirit. "Thus saith the Lord"--it is this tone that gives him his
+authority the world over.
+
+I never tire of those heroic lines of his in which he sounds a
+battle-cry to the spirit:
+
+    "Though love repine, and reason chafe,
+      There came a voice without reply,--
+    ''T is man's perdition to be safe,
+      When for the truth he ought to die.'"
+
+The last time I saw Emerson was at the Holmes seventieth-birthday
+breakfast in 1879. The serious break in his health had resulted in a
+marked aphasia, so that he could not speak the name of his nearest
+friend, nor answer the simplest question. Yet he was as serene as
+ever. Let the heavens fall--what matters it to me? his look seemed to
+say.
+
+Emerson's face had in it more of what we call the divine than had that
+of any other author of his time--that wonderful, kindly, wise
+smile--the smile of the soul--not merely the smile of good nature, but
+the smile of spiritual welcome and hospitality.
+
+Emerson had quality. A good Emersonian will recognize any passage from
+the Sage in a book of quotations, even if no name is appended.
+
+We speak of Emerson as outgrown, yet only yesterday I saw in J. Arthur
+Thomson's recent Gifford Lectures on "The System of Animate Nature,"
+repeated quotations from Emerson, mainly from his poetry. I think he
+is no more likely to be outgrown than are Wordsworth and Arnold. Yet I
+do not set the same value upon his poetry that I do upon that of
+Wordsworth at his best.
+
+Emerson is the last man we should expect to be guilty of
+misinterpreting Nature, yet he does so at times. He does so in this
+passage: "If Nature wants a thumb, she makes it at the cost of the
+arms and legs." As if the arm were weaker or less efficient because of
+the thumb. What would man's power be as a tool-using animal without
+his strong, opposable thumb? His grasp would be gone.
+
+He says truly that the gruesome, the disgusting, the repellent are not
+fit subjects for cabinet pictures. The "sacred subjects" to which he
+objects probably refer to the Crucifixion--the nails through the hands
+and feet, and the crown of thorns. But to jump from that fact to the
+assertion that Nature covers up the skeleton on the same grounds, is
+absurd. Do not all vertebrates require an osseous system? In the
+radiates and articulates she puts the bony system on the outside, but
+when she comes to her backbone animals, she perforce puts her osseous
+system beneath. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and
+skin and hair over it, not to hide it, but to use it. Would you have a
+man like a jellyfish?
+
+The same want of logic marks Carlyle's mind when he says: "The drop by
+continually falling bores its way through the hardest rock. The hasty
+torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace
+behind." But give the "hasty torrent" the same time you give the drop,
+and see what it will do to the rock!
+
+Emerson says, "A little more or a little less does not signify
+anything." But it does signify in this world of material things. Is
+one man as impressive as an army, one tree as impressive as a forest?
+"Scoop a little water in the hollow of your palm; take up a handful of
+shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but acres
+of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? A little more or
+a little less signifies nothing." It is the mass that does impress us,
+as Niagara does, as the midnight sky does. It is not as parts of this
+"astonishing astronomy," or as a "part of the round globe under the
+optical sky"--we do not think of that, but the imagination is moved by
+the vast sweep of the ocean and its abysmal depths, and its ceaseless
+rocking. In some cases we see the All in the little; the law that
+spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is seen in leasts is an
+old Latin maxim. The soap bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the
+boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam engine; but a tumbler of
+water throws no light on the sea, though its sweating may help explain
+the rain.
+
+Emerson quotes Goethe as saying, "The beautiful is a manifestation of
+secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever
+concealed from us." As if beauty were an objective reality instead of
+a subjective experience! As if it were something out there in the
+landscape that you may gather your arms full of and bring in! If you
+are an artist, you may bring in your vision of it, pass it through
+your own mind, and thus embalm and preserve the beauty. Or if you are
+a poet, you may have a similar experience and reproduce it, humanized,
+in a poem. But the beauty is always a distilled and re-created, or,
+shall we say, an incarnated beauty--a tangible and measurable
+something, like moisture in the air, or sugar in the trees, or quartz
+in the rocks. There is, and can be, no "science of beauty." Beauty,
+like truth, is an experience of the mind. It is the emotion you feel
+when in health you look from your door or window of a May morning. If
+you are ill, or oppressed with grief, or worried, you will hardly
+experience the emotion of the beautiful.
+
+Emerson said he was warned by the fate of many philosophers not to
+attempt a definition of beauty. But in trying to describe it and
+characterize it he ran the same risk. "We ascribe beauty to that which
+is simple," he said; "which has no superfluous parts; which exactly
+answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean
+of many extremes." Is a boot-jack beautiful? Is a crow-bar? Yet these
+are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their
+ends, they stand related to all things through the laws of chemistry
+and physics. A flower is beautiful, a shell on the beach is beautiful,
+a tree in full leaf, or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these
+things are not very simple. Complex things may be beautiful also. A
+village church may be beautiful no less than a Gothic cathedral.
+Emerson was himself a beautiful writer, a beautiful character, and his
+works are a priceless addition to literature.
+
+"Go out of the house to see the moon," says Emerson, "and it is mere
+tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your
+necessary journey." This is not true in my experience. The stars do
+not become mere tinsel, do they, when we go out to look at the
+overwhelming spectacle? Neither does the moon. Is it not a delight in
+itself to look at the full moon--
+
+    "The vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue,"
+
+as Whitman says?
+
+    "The moon doth look round her with delight when the heavens are bare,"
+
+says Wordsworth, and equally with delight do we regard the spectacle.
+The busy farmer in the fields rarely sees the beauty of Nature. He has
+not the necessary detachment. Put him behind his team and plough in
+the spring and he makes a pleasing picture to look upon, but the mind
+must be open to take in the beauty of Nature.
+
+Of course Emerson is only emphasizing the fact of the beauty of
+utility, of the things we do, of the buildings we put up for use, and
+not merely for show. A hut, a log cabin in a clearing, a farmer's
+unpainted barn, all have elements of beauty. A man leading a horse to
+water, or foddering his cattle from a stack in a snow-covered field,
+or following his plough, is always pleasing. Every day I pass along a
+road by a wealthy man's estate and see a very elaborate stone wall of
+cobblestones and cement which marks the boundary of his estate on the
+highway. The wall does not bend and undulate with the inequalities of
+the ground; its top is as level as a foundation wall; it is an offense
+to every passer-by; it has none of the simplicity that should mark a
+division wall; it is studied and elaborate, and courts your
+admiration. How much more pleasing a rough wall of field stone, or
+"wild stone," as our old wall-layer put it, with which the farmer
+separates his fields! No thought of looks, but only of utility. The
+showy, the highly ornate castle which the multimillionaire builds on
+his estate--would an artist ever want to put one of them in his
+picture? Beauty is likely to flee when we make a dead set at her.
+
+Emerson's exaggerations are sometimes so excessive as to be simply
+amusing, as, when speaking of the feats of the imagination, he says,
+"My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors
+and constellations." The baseball, revolving as it flies, may suggest
+the orbs, or your girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your
+face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain by the soil; but
+does the blacking of your shoes suggest anything celestial? Hinges and
+levers and fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or old boots,
+have not much poetic significance. An elm tree may suggest a
+cathedral, or a shell suggest the rainbow, or the sparkling frost
+suggest diamonds, or the thread that holds the beads symbolize the law
+that strings the spheres, but a button is a button, a shoestring a
+shoestring, and a spade a spade, and nothing more.
+
+I cherish and revere the name of Emerson so profoundly, and owe him
+such a debt, that it seems, after all, a pity to point out the flaws
+in his precious amber.
+
+Let us keep alive the Emersonian memories: that such a man has lived
+and wrought among us. Let us teach our children his brave and heroic
+words, and plant our lives upon as secure an ethical foundation as he
+did. Let us make pilgrimages to Concord, and stand with uncovered
+heads beneath the pine tree where his ashes rest. He left us an estate
+in the fair land of the Ideal. He bequeathed us treasures that thieves
+cannot break through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor moth
+destroy.[2]
+
+[Footnote 2: At the onset of the author's last illness he attempted to
+rearrange and improve this essay, but was even then unequal to it,
+and, after a little shifting and editing, gave it up. "Do what you can
+with it," he said; and when I asked him if he could not add a few
+words to close it, he sat up in bed, and wrote the closing sentences,
+which proved to be the last he ever penned.--C. B.]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU
+
+I
+
+
+After Emerson, the name of no New England man of letters keeps greener
+and fresher than that of Thoreau. A severe censor of his countrymen,
+and with few elements of popularity, yet the quality of his thought,
+the sincerity of his life, and the nearness and perennial interest of
+his themes, as well as his rare powers of literary expression, win
+recruits from each generation of readers. He does not grow stale any
+more than Walden Pond itself grows stale. He is an obstinate fact
+there in New England life and literature, and at the end of his first
+centennial his fame is more alive than ever.
+
+Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July, 1817, and passed
+most of his life of forty-five years in his native town, minding his
+own business, as he would say, which consisted, for the most part, in
+spending at least the half of each day in the open air, winter and
+summer, rain and shine, and in keeping tab upon all the doings of wild
+nature about him and recording his observations in his Journal.
+
+The two race strains that met in Thoreau, the Scottish and the French,
+come out strongly in his life and character. To the French he owes his
+vivacity, his lucidity, his sense of style, and his passion for the
+wild; for the French, with all their urbanity and love of art, turn to
+nature very easily. To the Scot he is indebted more for his character
+than for his intellect. From this source come his contrariness, his
+combativeness, his grudging acquiescence, and his pronounced
+mysticism. Thence also comes his genius for solitude. The man who in
+his cabin in the woods has a good deal of company "especially the
+mornings when nobody calls," is French only in the felicity of his
+expression. But there is much in Thoreau that is neither Gallic nor
+Scottish, but pure Thoreau.
+
+The most point-blank and authoritative criticism within my knowledge
+that Thoreau has received at the hands of his countrymen came from the
+pen of Lowell about 1864, and was included in "My Study Windows." It
+has all the professional smartness and scholarly qualities which
+usually characterize Lowell's critical essays. Thoreau was vulnerable,
+both as an observer and as a literary craftsman, and Lowell lets him
+off pretty easily--too easily--on both counts.
+
+The flaws he found in his nature lore were very inconsiderable: "Till
+he built his Walden shack he did not know that the hickory grew near
+Concord. Till he went to Maine he had never seen phosphorescent
+wood--a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he
+spoke of the seeding [_i. e._, flowering][3] of the pine as a new
+discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of
+blowing pollen might have earlier caught his eye."
+
+[Footnote 3: See "Walking" in _Excursions_. He was under thirty-three
+when he made these observations (June, 1850).]
+
+As regards his literary craftsmanship, Lowell charges him only with
+having revived the age of _concetti_ while he fancied himself going
+back to a preclassical nature, basing the charge on such a far-fetched
+comparison as that in which Thoreau declares his preference for "the
+dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the
+moss-beds" over the wit of the Greek sages as it comes to us in the
+"Banquet" of Xenophon--a kind of perversity of comparison all too
+frequent with Thoreau.
+
+But though Lowell lets Thoreau off easily on these specific counts, he
+more than makes up by his sweeping criticism, on more general grounds,
+of his life and character. Here one feels that he overdoes the matter.
+
+It is not true, in the sense which Lowell implies, that Thoreau's
+whole life was a search for the doctor. It was such a search in no
+other sense than that we are all in search of the doctor when we take
+a walk, or flee to the mountains or to the seashore, or seek to bring
+our minds and spirits in contact with "Nature's primal sanities." His
+search for the doctor turns out to be an escape from the conditions
+that make a doctor necessary. His wonderful activity, those long walks
+in all weathers, in all seasons, by night as well as by day, drenched
+by rain and chilled by frost, suggest a reckless kind of health. A
+doctor might wisely have cautioned him against such exposures. Nor was
+Thoreau a valetudinarian in his physical, moral, or intellectual
+fiber.
+
+It is not true, as Lowell charges, that it was his indolence that
+stood in the way of his taking part in the industrial activities in
+which his friends and neighbors engaged, or that it was his lack of
+persistence and purpose that hindered him. It is not true that he was
+poor because he looked upon money as an unmixed evil. Thoreau's
+purpose was like adamant, and his industry in his own proper pursuits
+was tireless. He knew the true value of money, and he knew also that
+the best things in life are to be had without money and without price.
+When he had need of money, he earned it. He turned his hand to many
+things--land-surveying, lecturing, magazine-writing, growing white
+beans, doing odd jobs at carpentering, whitewashing, fence-building,
+plastering, and brick-laying.
+
+Lowell's criticism amounts almost to a diatribe. He was naturally
+antagonistic to the Thoreau type of mind. Coming from a man near his
+own age, and a neighbor, Thoreau's criticism of life was an affront to
+the smug respectability and scholarly attainments of the class to
+which Lowell belonged. Thoreau went his own way, with an air of
+defiance and contempt which, no doubt, his contemporaries were more
+inclined to resent than we are at our distance. Shall this man in his
+hut on the shores of Walden Pond assume to lay down the law and the
+gospel to his elders and betters, and pass unrebuked, no matter on
+what intimate terms he claims to be with the gods of the woods and
+mountains? This seems to be Lowell's spirit.
+
+"Thoreau's experiment," says Lowell, "actually presupposed all that
+complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted
+on another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his
+bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough,
+his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the
+sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that
+such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." Very clever,
+but what of it? Of course Thoreau was a product of the civilization he
+decried. He was a product of his country and his times. He was born in
+Concord and early came under the influence of Emerson; he was a
+graduate of Harvard University and all his life availed himself, more
+or less, of the accumulated benefits of state and social
+organizations. When he took a train to Boston, or dropped a letter in,
+or received one through, the post office, or read a book, or visited a
+library, or looked in a newspaper, he was a sharer in these benefits.
+He made no claims to living independently of the rest of mankind. His
+only aim in his Walden experiment was to reduce life to its lowest
+terms, to drive it into a corner, as he said, and question and
+cross-question it, and see, if he could, what it really meant. And he
+probably came as near cornering it there in his hut on Walden Pond as
+any man ever did anywhere, certainly in a way more pleasing to
+contemplate than did the old hermits in the desert, or than did
+Diogenes in his tub, though Lowell says the tub of the old Greek had a
+sounder bottom.
+
+Lowell seemed to discredit Thoreau by attacking his philosophy and
+pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies of a man who
+abjures the civilization of which he is the product, overlooking the
+fact that man's theories and speculations may be very wide of the
+truth as we view it, and yet his life be noble and inspiring. Now
+Thoreau did not give us a philosophy, but a life. He gave us fresh and
+beautiful literature, he gave us our first and probably only nature
+classic, he gave us an example of plain living and high thinking that
+is always in season, and he took upon himself that kind of noble
+poverty that carries the suggestion of wealth of soul.
+
+No matter how much Thoreau abjured our civilization, he certainly made
+good use of the weapons it gave him. No matter whose lands he squatted
+on, or whose saw he borrowed, or to whom or what he was indebted for
+the tools and utensils that made his life at Walden possible,--these
+things were the mere accidents of his environment,--he left a record
+of his life and thoughts there which is a precious heritage to his
+countrymen. The best in his books ranks with the best in the
+literature of his times. One could wish that he had shown more
+tolerance for the things other men live for, but this must not make us
+overlook the value of the things he himself lived for, though with
+some of his readers his intolerance doubtless has this effect. We
+cannot all take to the woods and swamps as Thoreau did. He had a
+genius for that kind of a life; the most of us must stick to our farms
+and desks and shops and professions.
+
+Thoreau retired to Walden for study and contemplation, and because, as
+he said, he had a little private business with himself. He found that
+by working about six weeks in the year he could meet all his living
+expenses, and then have all his winter and most of his summers free
+and clear for study. He found that to maintain one's self on this
+earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if one will live simply and
+wisely. He said, "It is not necessary that a man should earn his
+living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do."
+Was not his experiment worth while?
+
+"Walden" is a wonderful and delightful piece of brag, but it is much
+more than that. It is literature; it is a Gospel of the Wild. It made
+a small Massachusetts pond famous, and the Mecca of many devout
+pilgrims.
+
+Lowell says that Thoreau had no humor, but there are many pages in
+"Walden" that are steeped in a quiet but most delicious humor. His
+humor brings that inward smile which is the badge of art's felicity.
+His "Bean-Field" is full of it. I venture to say that never before had
+a hermit so much fun with a field of white beans.
+
+Both by training and by temperament Lowell was disqualified from
+entering into Thoreau's character and aims. Lowell's passion for books
+and academic accomplishments was as strong as was Thoreau's passion
+for the wild and for the religion of Nature. When Lowell went to
+Nature for a theme, as in his "Good Word for Winter," his "My Garden
+Acquaintance," and the "Moosehead Journal," his use of it was mainly
+to unlock the treasures of his literary and scholarly attainments; he
+bedecked and be jeweled Nature with gems from all the literatures of
+the world. In the "Journal" we get more of the flavor of libraries
+than of the Maine woods and waters. No reader of Lowell can doubt that
+he was a nature-lover, nor can he doubt that he loved books and
+libraries more. In all his nature writings the poverty of the
+substance and the wealth of the treatment are striking. The final
+truth about Lowell's contributions is that his mind was essentially a
+prose mind, even when he writes poetry. Emerson said justly that his
+tone was always that of prose. What is his "Cathedral" but versified
+prose? Like so many cultivated men, he showed a talent for poetry, but
+not genius; as, on the other hand, one may say of Emerson that he
+showed more genius for poetry than talent, his inspiration surpassed
+his technical skill.
+
+One is not surprised when he finds that John Brown was one of
+Thoreau's heroes; he was a sort of John Brown himself in another
+sphere; but one is surprised when one finds him so heartily approving
+of Walt Whitman and traveling to Brooklyn to look upon him and hear
+his voice. He recognized at once the tremendous significance of
+Whitman and the power of his poetry. He called him the greatest
+democrat which the world had yet seen. With all his asceticism and his
+idealism, he was not troubled at all with those things in Whitman that
+are a stumbling-block to so many persons. Evidently his long
+intercourse with Nature had prepared him for the primitive and
+elemental character of Whitman's work. No doubt also his familiarity
+with the great poems and sacred books of the East helped him. At any
+rate, in this respect, his endorsement of Whitman adds greatly to our
+conception of the mental and spiritual stature of Thoreau.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I can hold my criticism in the back of my head while I say with my
+forehead that all our other nature writers seem tame and insipid
+beside Thoreau. He was so much more than a mere student and observer
+of nature; and it is this surplusage which gives the extra weight and
+value to his nature writing. He was a critic of life, he was a
+literary force that made for plain living and high thinking. His
+nature lore was an aside; he gathered it as the meditative saunterer
+gathers a leaf, or a flower, or a shell on the beach, while he ponders
+on higher things. He had other business with the gods of the woods
+than taking an inventory of their wares. He was a dreamer, an
+idealist, a fervid ethical teacher, seeking inspiration in the fields
+and woods. The hound, the turtle-dove, and the bay horse which he said
+he had lost, and for whose trail he was constantly seeking, typified
+his interest in wild nature. The natural history in his books is quite
+secondary. The natural or supernatural history of his own thought
+absorbed him more than the exact facts about the wild life around
+him. He brings us a gospel more than he brings us a history. His
+science is only the handmaid of his ethics; his wood-lore is the foil
+of his moral and intellectual teachings. His observations are
+frequently at fault, or wholly wide of the mark; but the flower or
+specimen that he brings you always "comes laden with a thought." There
+is a tang and a pungency to nearly everything he published; the
+personal quality which flavors it is like the formic acid which the
+bee infuses into the nectar he gets from the flower, and which makes
+it honey.
+
+I feel that some such statement about Thoreau should precede or go
+along with any criticism of him as a writer or as an observer. He was,
+first and last, a moral force speaking in the terms of the literary
+naturalist.
+
+Thoreau's prayer in one of his poems--that he might greatly disappoint
+his friends--seems to have been answered. While his acquaintances went
+into trade or the professions, he cast about to see what he could do
+to earn his living and still be true to the call of his genius. In his
+Journal of 1851 he says: "While formerly I was looking about to see
+what I could do for a living, some sad experiences in conforming to
+the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I
+thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I
+could do, and its small profits might suffice, so little capital is
+required, so little distraction from my wonted thoughts." He could
+range the hills in summer and still look after the flocks of King
+Admetus. He also dreamed that he might gather the wild herbs and carry
+evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods. But
+he soon learned that trade cursed everything, and that "though you
+trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to
+the business." The nearest his conscience would allow him to approach
+any kind of trade was to offer himself to his townsmen as a
+land-surveyor. This would take him to the places where he liked to be;
+he could still walk in the fields and woods and swamps and earn his
+living thereby. The chain and compass became him well, quite as well
+as his bean-field at Walden, and the little money they brought him was
+not entirely sordid.
+
+In one of his happy moods in "Walden" he sets down in a
+half-facetious, half-mystical, but wholly delightful way, his various
+avocations, such as his self-appointment as inspector of snow-storms
+and rain-storms, and surveyor of forest paths and all across-lot
+routes, and herdsman of the wild stock of the town. He is never more
+enjoyable than in such passages. His account of going into business at
+Walden Pond is in the same happy vein. As his fellow citizens were
+slow in offering him any opening in which he could earn a living, he
+turned to the woods, where he was better known, and determined to go
+into business at once without waiting to acquire the usual capital. He
+expected to open trade with the Celestial Empire, and Walden was just
+the place to start the venture. He thought his strict business habits
+acquired through years of keeping tab on wild Nature's doings, his
+winter days spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the
+wind, and his early spring mornings before his neighbors were astir to
+hear the croak of the first frog, all the training necessary to ensure
+success in business with the Celestial Empire. He admits, it is true,
+that he never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but doubted
+not that it was of the last importance only to be present at it. All
+such fooling as this is truly delightful. When he goes about his
+sylvan business with his tongue in his cheek and a quizzical,
+good-humored look upon his face in this way, and advertises the hound,
+the bay horse, and the turtle-dove he lost so long ago, he is the true
+Thoreau, and we take him to our hearts.
+
+One also enjoys the way in which he magnifies his petty occupations.
+His brag over his bean-field is delightful. He makes one want to hoe
+beans with him:
+
+     When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to
+     the woods and the sky and was an accompaniment to my labor
+     which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no
+     longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I
+     remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at
+     all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the
+     oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny
+     afternoons--for I sometimes made a day of it--like a mote in
+     the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with
+     a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at
+     last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope
+     remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on
+     the ground on bare sand or rocks on the top of hills, where
+     few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples
+     caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to
+     float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The
+     hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and
+     surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to
+     the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I
+     watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky,
+     alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving
+     one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own
+     thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons
+     from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing
+     sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe
+     turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish salamander, a
+     trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I
+     paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard
+     and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible
+     entertainment which the country offers.
+
+All this is in his best style. Who, after reading it, does not long
+for a bean-field? In planting it, too what music attends him!
+
+     Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the
+     brown thrasher--or red mavis, as some love to call him--all
+     the morning, glad of your society, that would find out
+     another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are
+     planting the seed he cries,--"Drop it, drop it,--cover it
+     up, cover it up,--pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But
+     this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as
+     he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini
+     performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with
+     your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or
+     plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had
+     entire faith.
+
+What lessons he got in botany in the hoeing!
+
+     Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes
+     with various kinds of weeds,--it will bear some iteration in
+     the account, for there was no little iteration in the
+     labor,--disturbing their delicate organizations so
+     ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his
+     hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously
+     cultivating another. That's Roman worm-wood,--that's
+     pigweed,--that's sorrel,--that's pipergrass,--have at him,
+     chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him
+     have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'
+     other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long
+     war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had
+     sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me
+     come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of
+     their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many
+     a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above
+     his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in
+     the dust.
+
+     I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when
+     the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an
+     old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to
+     have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with
+     pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new
+     eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful
+     evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even
+     without apples or cider,--a most wise and humorous friend,
+     whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever
+     did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead,
+     none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too,
+     dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in
+     whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes,
+     gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a
+     genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back
+     farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of
+     every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the
+     incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old
+     dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is
+     likely to outlive all her children yet.
+
+Thoreau taxed himself to find words and images strong enough to
+express his aversion to the lives of the men who were "engaged" in the
+various industrial fields about him. Everywhere in shops and offices
+and fields it appeared to him that his neighbors were doing penance in
+a thousand remarkable ways:
+
+     What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires
+     and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended,
+     with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the
+     heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible
+     for them to resume their natural position, while from the
+     twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the
+     stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a
+     tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the
+     breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops
+     of pillars,--even these forms of conscious penance are
+     hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which
+     I daily witness.... I see young men, my townsmen, whose
+     misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns,
+     cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily
+     acquired than got rid of.
+
+Surely this disciple of the Gospel of the Wild must have disappointed
+his friends. It was this audacious gift which Thoreau had for making
+worldly possessions seem ignoble, that gives the tang to many pages of
+his writings.
+
+Thoreau became a great traveler--in Concord, as he says--and made
+Walden Pond famous in our literature by spending two or more years in
+the woods upon its shore, and writing an account of his sojourn there
+which has become a nature classic. He was a poet-naturalist, as his
+friend Channing aptly called him, of untiring industry, and the
+country in a radius of seven or eight miles about Concord was threaded
+by him in all seasons as probably no other section of New England was
+ever threaded and scrutinized by any one man. Walking in the fields
+and woods, and recording what he saw and heard and thought in his
+Journal, became the business of his life. He went over the same ground
+endlessly, but always brought back new facts, or new impressions,
+because he was so sensitive to all the changing features of the day
+and the season in the landscape about him.
+
+Once he extended his walking as far as Quebec, Canada, and once he
+took in the whole of Cape Cod; three or four times he made excursions
+to the Maine woods, the result of which gave the name to one of his
+most characteristic volumes; but as habitually as the coming of the
+day was he a walker about Concord, in all seasons, primarily for
+companionship with untamed Nature, and secondarily as a gleaner in the
+fields of natural history.
+
+II
+
+Thoreau was not a great philosopher, he was not a great naturalist, he
+was not a great poet, but as a nature-writer and an original character
+he is unique in our literature. His philosophy begins and ends with
+himself, or is entirely subjective, and is frequently fantastic, and
+nearly always illogical. His poetry is of the oracular kind, and is
+only now and then worth attention. There are crudities in his writings
+that make the conscientious literary craftsman shudder; there are
+mistakes of observation that make the serious naturalist wonder; and
+there is often an expression of contempt for his fellow countrymen,
+and the rest of mankind, and their aims in life, that makes the
+judicious grieve. But at his best there is a gay symbolism, a felicity
+of description, and a freshness of observation that delight all
+readers.
+
+As a person he gave himself to others reluctantly; he was, in truth, a
+recluse. He stood for character more than for intellect, and for
+intuition more than for reason. He was often contrary and
+inconsistent. There was more crust than crumb in the loaf he gave us.
+
+He went about the business of living with his head in the clouds, or
+with an absolute devotion to the ideal that is certainly rare in our
+literary history. He declared that he aimed to crow like chanticleer
+in the morning, if only to wake his neighbors up. Much of his writings
+have this chanticleerian character; they are a call to wake up, to rub
+the film from one's eyes, and see the real values of life. To this end
+he prods with paradoxes, he belabors with hyperboles, he teases with
+irony, he startles with the unexpected. He finds poverty more
+attractive than riches, solitude more welcome than society, a sphagnum
+swamp more to be desired than a flowered field.
+
+Thoreau is suggestive of those antibodies which modern science makes
+so much of. He tends to fortify us against the dry rot of business,
+the seductions of social pleasures, the pride of wealth and position.
+He is antitoxic; he is a literary germicide of peculiar power. He is
+too religious to go to church, too patriotic to pay his taxes, too
+fervent a humanist to interest himself in the social welfare of his
+neighborhood.
+
+Thoreau called himself a mystic, and a transcendentalist, and a
+natural philosopher to boot. But the least of these was the natural
+philosopher. He did not have the philosophic mind, nor the scientific
+mind; he did not inquire into the reason of things, nor the meaning of
+things; in fact, had no disinterested interest in the universe apart
+from himself. He was too personal and illogical for a philosopher. The
+scientific interpretation of things did not interest him at all. He
+was interested in things only so far as they related to Henry Thoreau.
+He interpreted Nature entirely in the light of his own idiosyncrasies.
+
+Science goes its own way in spite of our likes and dislikes, but
+Thoreau's likes and dislikes determined everything for him. He was
+stoical, but not philosophical. His intellect had no free play outside
+his individual predilection. Truth as philosophers use the term, was
+not his quest but truth made in Concord.
+
+Thoreau writes that when he was once asked by the Association for the
+Advancement of Science what branch of science he was especially
+interested in, he did not reply because he did not want to make
+himself the laughing-stock of the scientific community, which did not
+believe in a science which deals with the higher law--his higher law,
+which bears the stamp of Henry Thoreau.
+
+He was an individualist of the most pronounced type. The penalty of
+this type of mind is narrowness; the advantage is the personal flavor
+imparted to the written page. Thoreau's books contain plenty of the
+pepper and salt of character and contrariness; even their savor of
+whim and prejudice adds to their literary tang. When his individualism
+becomes aggressive egotism, as often happens, it is irritating; but
+when it gives only that pungent and personal flavor which pervades
+much of "Walden," it is very welcome.
+
+Thoreau's critics justly aver that he severely arraigns his countrymen
+because they are not all Thoreaus--that they do not desert their farms
+and desks and shops and take to the woods. What unmeasured contempt he
+pours out upon the lives and ambitions of most of them! Need a
+nature-lover, it is urged, necessarily be a man-hater? Is not man a
+part of nature?--averaging up quite as good as the total scheme of
+things out of which he came? Cannot his vices and shortcomings be
+matched by a thousand cruel and abortive things in the fields and the
+woods? The fountain cannot rise above its source, and man is as good
+as is the nature out of which he came, and of which he is a part. Most
+of Thoreau's harsh judgments upon his neighbors and countrymen are
+only his extreme individualism gone to seed.
+
+An extremist he always was. Extreme views commended themselves to him
+because they were extreme. His aim in writing was usually "to make an
+extreme statement." He left the middle ground to the school committees
+and trustees. He had in him the stuff of which martyrs and heroes are
+made. In John Brown he recognized a kindred soul. But his literary
+bent led him to take his own revolutionary impulses out in words. The
+closest he came to imitation of the hero of Harper's Ferry and to
+defying the Government was on one occasion when he refused to pay his
+poll-tax and thus got himself locked in jail overnight. It all seems a
+petty and ignoble ending of his fierce denunciation of politics and
+government, but it no doubt helped to satisfy his imagination, which
+so tyrannized over him throughout life. He could endure offenses
+against his heart and conscience and reason easier than against his
+imagination.
+
+He presents that curious phenomenon of a man who is an extreme product
+of culture and civilization, and yet who so hungers and thirsts for
+the wild and the primitive that he is unfair to the forces and
+conditions out of which he came, and by which he is at all times
+nourished and upheld. He made his excursions into the Maine wilderness
+and lived in his hut by Walden Pond as a scholar and philosopher, and
+not at all in the spirit of the lumbermen and sportsmen whose wildness
+he so much admired. It was from his vantage-ground of culture and of
+Concord transcendentalism that he appraised all these types. It was
+from a community built up and sustained by the common industries and
+the love of gain that he decried all these things. It was from a town
+and a civilization that owed much to the pine tree that he launched
+his diatribe against the lumbermen in the Maine woods: "The pine is no
+more lumber than man is; and to be made into boards and houses no more
+its true and highest use than the truest use of man is to be cut down
+and made into manure." Not a happy comparison, but no matter. If the
+pine tree had not been cut down and made into lumber, it is quite
+certain that Thoreau would never have got to the Maine woods to utter
+this protest, just as it is equally certain that had he not been a
+member of a thrifty and industrious community, and kept his hold upon
+it, he could not have made his Walden experiment of toying and
+coquetting with the wild and the non-industrial. His occupations as
+land-surveyor, lyceum lecturer, and magazine writer attest how much he
+owed to the civilization he was so fond of decrying. This is Thoreau's
+weakness--the half-truths in which he plumes himself, as if they were
+the whole law and gospel. His Walden bean-field was only a pretty
+piece of play-acting; he cared more for the ringing of his hoe upon
+the stones than for the beans. Had his living really depended upon the
+product, the sound would not have pleased him so, and the botany of
+the weeds he hoed under would not have so interested him.
+
+Thoreau's half-truths titillate and amuse the mind. We do not nod over
+his page. We enjoy his art while experiencing an undercurrent of
+protest against his unfairness. We could have wished him to have shown
+himself in his writings as somewhat sweeter and more tolerant toward
+the rest of the world, broader in outlook, and more just and
+charitable in disposition--more like his great prototype, Emerson, who
+could do full justice to the wild and the spontaneous without doing an
+injustice to their opposites; who could see the beauty of the pine
+tree, yet sing the praises of the pine-tree State House; who could
+arraign the Government, yet pay his taxes; who could cherish Thoreau,
+and yet see all his limitations. Emerson affirmed more than he denied,
+and his charity was as broad as his judgment. He set Thoreau a good
+example in bragging, but he bragged to a better purpose. He exalted
+the present moment, the universal fact, the omnipotence of the moral
+law, the sacredness of private judgment; he pitted the man of to-day
+against all the saints and heroes of history; and, although he decried
+traveling, he was yet considerable of a traveler, and never tried to
+persuade himself that Concord was an epitome of the world. Emerson
+comes much nearer being a national figure than does Thoreau, and yet
+Thoreau, by reason of his very narrowness and perversity, and by his
+intense local character, united to the penetrating character of his
+genius, has made an enduring impression upon our literature.
+
+III
+
+Thoreau's life was a search for the wild. He was the great disciple of
+the Gospel of Walking. He elevated walking into a religious exercise.
+One of his most significant and entertaining chapters is on "Walking."
+No other writer that I recall has set forth the Gospel of Walking so
+eloquently and so stimulatingly. Thoreau's religion and his philosophy
+are all in this chapter. It is his most mature, his most complete and
+comprehensive statement. He says:
+
+     I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my
+     life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking
+     walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_,
+     which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who
+     roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked
+     charity, under pretence of going _a la Sainte Terre_," to
+     the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a
+     _Sainte-Terrer_,"--a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who
+     never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend,
+     are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go
+     there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean....
+     For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter
+     the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land
+     from the hands of the Infidels.
+
+Thoreau was the first man in this country, or in any other, so far as
+I know, who made a religion of walking--the first to announce a Gospel
+of the Wild. That he went forth into wild nature in much the same
+spirit that the old hermits went into the desert, and was as devout in
+his way as they were in theirs, is revealed by numerous passages in
+his Journal. He would make his life a sacrament; he discarded the old
+religious terms and ideas, and struck out new ones of his own:
+
+     What more glorious condition of being can we imagine than
+     from impure to become pure? May I not forget that I am
+     impure and vicious! May I not cease to love purity! May I go
+     to my slumbers as expecting to arise to a new and more
+     perfect day! May I so live and refine my life as fitting
+     myself for a society ever higher than I actually enjoy!
+
+     To watch for and describe all the divine features which I
+     detect in nature! My profession is to be always on the alert
+     to find God in nature, to know his lurking-place, to attend
+     all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.
+
+     Ah! I would walk, I would sit, and sleep, with natural
+     piety. What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went
+     along the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds? For
+     joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried
+     in it.
+
+     I do not deserve anything. I am unworthy the least regard,
+     and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and
+     yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are
+     prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. But I
+     cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to
+     the human friends I have.
+
+In the essay on "Walking," Thoreau says that the art of walking "comes
+only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
+Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
+Walkers." "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,
+unless I spend four hours a day at least,--it is commonly more than
+that,--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
+absolutely free from all worldly engagements."
+
+Thoreau made good his boast. He was a new kind of walker, a
+Holy-Lander. His walks yielded him mainly spiritual and ideal results.
+The fourteen published volumes of his Journal are mainly a record of
+his mental reactions to the passing seasons and to the landscape he
+sauntered through. There is a modicum of natural history, but mostly
+he reaps the intangible harvest of the poet, the saunterer, the
+mystic, the super-sportsman.
+
+With his usual love of paradox Thoreau says that the fastest way to
+travel is to go afoot, because, one may add, the walker is constantly
+arriving at his destination; all places are alike to him, his harvest
+grows all along the road and beside every path, in every field and
+wood and on every hilltop.
+
+All of Thoreau's books belong to the literature of Walking, and are as
+true in spirit in Paris or London as in Concord. His natural history,
+for which he had a passion, is the natural history of the walker, not
+always accurate, as I have pointed out, but always graphic and
+interesting.
+
+Wordsworth was about the first poet-walker--a man of letters who made
+a business of walking, and whose study was really the open air. But he
+was not a Holy-Lander in the Thoreau sense. He did not walk to get
+away from people as Thoreau did, but to see a greater variety of them,
+and to gather suggestions for his poems. Not so much the wild as the
+human and the morally significant were the objects of Wordsworth's
+quest. He haunted waterfalls and fells and rocky heights and lonely
+tarns, but he was not averse to footpaths and highways, and the
+rustic, half-domesticated nature of rural England. He was a
+nature-lover; he even calls himself a nature-worshiper; and he appears
+to have walked as many, or more, hours each day, in all seasons, as
+did Thoreau; but he was hunting for no lost paradise of the wild; nor
+waging a war against the arts and customs of civilization. Man and
+life were at the bottom of his interest in Nature.
+
+Wordsworth never knew the wild as we know it in this country--the
+pitilessly savage and rebellious; and, on the other hand, he never
+knew the wonderfully delicate and furtive and elusive nature that we
+know; but he knew the sylvan, the pastoral, the rustic-human, as we
+cannot know them. British birds have nothing plaintive in their
+songs; and British woods and fells but little that is disorderly and
+cruel in their expression, or violent in their contrasts.
+
+Wordsworth gathered his finest poetic harvest from common nature and
+common humanity about him--the wayside birds and flowers and
+waterfalls, and the wayside people. Though he called himself a
+worshiper of Nature, it was Nature in her half-human moods that he
+adored--Nature that knows no extremes, and that has long been under
+the influence of man--a soft, humid, fertile, docile Nature, that
+suggests a domesticity as old and as permanent as that of cattle and
+sheep. His poetry reflects these features, reflects the high moral and
+historic significance of the European landscape, while the poetry of
+Emerson, and of Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness of
+our more capricious and unkempt Nature.
+
+The walker has no axe to grind; he sniffs the air for new adventure;
+he loiters in old scenes, he gleans in old fields. He only seeks
+intimacy with Nature to surprise her preoccupied with her own affairs.
+He seeks her in the woods, the swamps, on the hills, along the
+streams, by night and by day, in season and out of season. He skims
+the fields and hillsides as the swallow skims the air, and what he
+gets is intangible to most persons. He sees much with his eyes, but he
+sees more with his heart and imagination. He bathes in Nature as in a
+sea. He is alert for the beauty that waves in the trees, that ripples
+in the grass and grain, that flows in the streams, that drifts in the
+clouds, that sparkles in the dew and rain. The hammer of the
+geologist, the notebook of the naturalist, the box of the herbalist,
+the net of the entomologist, are not for him. He drives no sharp
+bargains with Nature, he reads no sermons in stones, no books in
+running brooks, but he does see good in everything. The book he reads
+he reads through all his senses--through his eyes, his ears, his nose,
+and also through his feet and hands--and its pages are open
+everywhere; the rocks speak of more than geology to him, the birds of
+more than ornithology, the flowers of more than botany, the stars of
+more than astronomy, the wild creatures of more than zooelogy.
+
+The average walker is out for exercise and the exhilarations of the
+road, he reaps health and strength; but Thoreau evidently impaired his
+health by his needless exposure and inadequate food. He was a
+Holy-Lander who falls and dies in the Holy Land. He ridiculed walking
+for exercise--taking a walk as the sick take medicine; the walk itself
+was to be the "enterprise and adventure of the day." And "you must
+walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates
+while walking."
+
+IV
+
+Thoreau's friends and neighbors seem to have persuaded themselves that
+his natural-history lore was infallible, and, moreover, that he
+possessed some mysterious power over the wild creatures about him that
+other men did not possess. I recall how Emerson fairly bristled up
+when on one occasion while in conversation with him I told him I
+thought Thoreau in his trips to the Maine woods had confounded the
+hermit thrush with the wood thrush, as the latter was rarely or never
+found in Maine. As for Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures,
+Emerson voiced this superstition when he said, "Snakes coiled round
+his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them from the
+water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took
+the foxes under his protection from the hunters." Of course Thoreau
+could do nothing with the wild creatures that you or I could not do
+under the same conditions. A snake will coil around any man's leg if
+he steps on its tail, but it will not be an embrace of affection; and
+a fish will swim into his hands under the same conditions that it will
+into Thoreau's. As for pulling a woodchuck out of its hole by the
+tail, the only trouble is to get hold of the tail. The 'chuck is
+pretty careful to keep his tail behind him, but many a farm boy, aided
+by his dog, has pulled one out of the stone wall by the tail, much
+against the 'chuck's will. If Thoreau's friends were to claim that he
+could carry _Mephitis mephitica_ by the tail with impunity, I can say
+I have done the same thing, and had my photograph taken in the act.
+The skunk is no respecter of persons, and here again the trouble is to
+get hold of the tail at the right moment--and, I may add, to let go of
+it at the right moment.
+
+Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures is what every man
+possesses who is alike gentle in his approach to them. Bradford Torrey
+succeeded, after a few experiments, in so dispelling the fears of an
+incubating red-eyed vireo that she would take insect food from his
+hand, and I have known several persons to become so familiar with the
+chickadees that they would feed from the hand, and in some instances
+even take food from between the lips. If you have a chipmunk for a
+neighbor, you may soon become on such intimate terms with him that he
+will search your pockets for nuts and sit on your knee and shoulder
+and eat them. But why keep alive and circulate as truth these animal
+legends of the prescientific ages?
+
+Thoreau was not a born naturalist, but a born supernaturalist. He was
+too intent upon the bird behind the bird always to take careful note
+of the bird itself. He notes the birds, but not too closely. He was at
+times a little too careless in this respect to be a safe guide to the
+bird-student. Even the saunterer to the Holy Land ought to know the
+indigo bunting from the black-throated blue warbler, with its languid,
+midsummery, "Zee, zee, zee-eu."
+
+Many of his most interesting natural-history notes Thoreau got from
+his farmer friends--Melvin, Minott, Miles, Hubbard, Wheeler. Their
+eyes were more single to the life around them than were his; none of
+them had lost a hound, a turtle-dove, and a bay horse, whose trail
+they were daily in quest of.
+
+A haunter of swamps and river marshes all his life, he had never yet
+observed how the night bittern made its booming or pumping sound, but
+accepted the explanation of one of his neighbors that it was produced
+by the bird thrusting its bill in water, sucking up as much as it
+could hold, and then pumping it out again with four or five heaves of
+the neck, throwing the water two or three feet--in fact, turning
+itself into a veritable pump! I have stood within a few yards of the
+bird when it made the sound, and seen the convulsive movement of the
+neck and body, and the lifting of the head as the sound escaped. The
+bird seems literally to vomit up its notes, but it does not likewise
+emit water.
+
+Every farmer and fox-hunter would smile if he read Thoreau's
+statement, made in his paper on the natural history of Massachusetts,
+that "when the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep, you
+may give chase and come up with the fox on foot." Evidently Thoreau
+had never tried it. With a foot and a half, or two feet of snow on the
+ground, and traveling on snowshoes, you might force a fox to take to
+his hole, but you would not come up to him. In four or five feet of
+soft snow hunters come up with the deer, and ride on their backs for
+amusement, but I doubt if a red fox ever ventures out in such a depth
+of snow. In one of his May walks in 1860, Thoreau sees the trail of
+the musquash in the mud along the river-bottoms, and he is taken by
+the fancy that, as our roads and city streets often follow the early
+tracks of the cow, so "rivers in another period follow the trail of
+the musquash." As if the river was not there before the musquash was!
+
+Again, his mysterious "night warbler," to which he so often alludes,
+was one of our common everyday birds which most school-children know,
+namely, the oven-bird, or wood-accentor, yet to Thoreau it was a sort
+of phantom bird upon which his imagination loved to dwell. Emerson
+told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should
+have nothing more to show him. But how such a haunter of woods escaped
+identifying the bird is a puzzle.
+
+In his walks in the Maine woods Thoreau failed to discriminate the
+song of the hermit thrush from that of the wood thrush. The melody,
+no doubt, went to his heart, and that was enough. Though he sauntered
+through orchards and rested under apple trees, he never observed that
+the rings of small holes in the bark were usually made by the
+yellow-bellied woodpecker, instead of by Downy, and that the bird was
+not searching for grubs or insects, but was feeding upon the milky
+cambium layer of the inner bark.
+
+But Thoreau's little slips of the kind I have called attention to
+count as nothing against the rich harvest of natural-history notes
+with which his work abounds. He could describe bird-songs and animal
+behavior and give these things their right emphasis in the life of the
+landscape as no other New England writer has done. His account of the
+battle of the ants in Walden atones an hundred-fold for the lapses I
+have mentioned.
+
+One wonders just what Thoreau means when he says in "Walden," in
+telling of his visit to "Baker Farm": "Once it chanced that I stood in
+the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum
+of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling
+me as if I looked through colored crystal." Is it possible, then, to
+reach the end of the rainbow? Why did he not dig for the pot of gold
+that is buried there? How he could be aware that he was standing at
+the foot of one leg of the glowing arch is to me a mystery. When I
+see a rainbow, it is always immediately in front of me. I am standing
+exactly between the highest point of the arch and the sun, and the
+laws of optics ordain that it can be seen in no other way. You can
+never see a rainbow at an angle. It always faces you squarely. Hence
+no two persons see exactly the same bow, because no two persons can
+occupy exactly the same place at the same time. The bow you see is
+directed to you alone. Move to the right or the left, and it moves as
+fast as you do. You cannot flank it or reach its end. It is about the
+most subtle and significant phenomenon that everyday Nature presents
+to us. Unapproachable as a spirit, like a visitant from another world,
+yet the creation of the familiar sun and rain!
+
+How Thoreau found himself standing in the bow's abutment will always
+remain a puzzle to me. Observers standing on high mountains with the
+sun low in the west have seen the bow as a complete circle. This one
+can understand.
+
+We can point many a moral and adorn many a tale with Thoreau's
+shortcomings and failures in his treatment of nature themes. Channing
+quotes him as saying that sometimes "you must see with the inside of
+your eye." I think that Thoreau saw, or tried to see, with the inside
+of his eye too often. He does not always see correctly, and many times
+he sees more of Thoreau than he does of the nature he assumes to be
+looking at. Truly it is "needless to travel for wonders," but the
+wonderful is not one with the fantastic or the far-fetched. Forcible
+expression, as I have said, was his ruling passion as a writer. Only
+when he is free from its thrall, which in his best moments he surely
+is, does he write well. When he can forget Thoreau and remember only
+nature, we get those delightful descriptions and reflections in
+"Walden." When he goes to the Maine woods or to Cape Cod or to Canada,
+he leaves all his fantastic rhetoric behind him and gives us sane and
+refreshing books. In his walks with Channing one suspects he often let
+himself go to all lengths, did his best to turn the world inside out,
+as he did at times in his Journals, for his own edification and that
+of his wondering disciple.
+
+To see analogies and resemblances everywhere is the gift of genius,
+but to see a resemblance to volcanoes in the hubs or gnarls on birch
+or beech trees, or cathedral windows in the dead leaves of the
+andromeda in January, or a suggestion of Teneriffe in a stone-heap,
+does not indicate genius. To see the great in the little, or the whole
+of Nature in any of her parts, is the poet's gift, but to ask, after
+seeing the andropogon grass, "Are there no purple reflections from the
+culms of thought in my mind?"--a remark which Channing quotes as very
+significant--is not to be poetical. Thoreau is full of these
+impossible and fantastic comparisons, thinking only of striking
+expressions and not at all about the truth. "The flowing of the sap
+under the dull rind of the trees" is suggestive, but what suggestion
+is there in the remark, "May I ever be in as good spirits as a
+willow"? The mood of the scrub oak was more habitual with him.
+
+Thoreau was in no sense an interpreter of nature; he did not draw out
+its meanings or seize upon and develop its more significant phases.
+Seldom does he relate what he sees or thinks to the universal human
+heart and mind. He has rare power of description, but is very limited
+in his power to translate the facts and movements of nature into human
+emotion. His passage on the northern lights, which Channing quotes
+from the Journals, is a good sample of his failure in this respect:
+
+     Now the fire in the north increases wonderfully, not
+     shooting up so much as creeping along, like a fire on the
+     mountains of the north seen afar in the night. The
+     Hyperborean gods are burning brush, and it spread, and all
+     the hoes in heaven couldn't stop it. It spread from west to
+     east over the crescent hill. Like a vast fiery worm it lay
+     across the northern sky, broken into many pieces; and each
+     piece, with rainbow colors skirting it, strove to advance
+     itself toward the east, worm-like, on its own annular
+     muscles. It has spread into their choicest wood-lots. Now it
+     shoots up like a single solitary watch-fire or burning bush,
+     or where it ran up a pine tree like powder, and still it
+     continues to gleam here and there like a fat stump in the
+     burning, and is reflected in the water. And now I see the
+     gods by great exertions have got it under, and the stars
+     have come out without fear, in peace.
+
+I get no impression of the mysterious almost supernatural character of
+the aurora from such a description in terms of a burning wood-lot or a
+hay-stack; it is no more like a conflagration than an apparition is
+like solid flesh and blood. Its wonderful, I almost said its
+spiritual, beauty, its sudden vanishings and returnings, its spectral,
+evanescent character--why, it startles and awes one as if it were the
+draperies around the throne of the Eternal. And then his mixed
+metaphor--the Hyperborean gods turned farmers and busy at burning
+brush, then a fiery worm, and then the burning wood-lots! But this is
+Thoreau--inspired with the heavenly elixir one moment, and drunk with
+the brew in his own cellar the next.
+
+V
+
+Thoreau's faults as a writer are as obvious as his merits. Emerson hit
+upon one of them when he said, "The trick of his rhetoric is soon
+learned; it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought,
+its diametrical antagonist." He praises wild mountains and winter
+forests for their domestic air, snow and ice for their warmth, and so
+on. (Yet Emerson in one of his poems makes frost burn and fire
+freeze.) One frequently comes upon such sentences as these: "If I were
+sadder, I should be happier"; "The longer I have forgotten you, the
+more I remember you." It may give a moment's pleasure when a writer
+takes two opposites and rubs their ears together in that way, but one
+may easily get too much of it. Words really mean nothing when used in
+such a manner. When Emerson told Channing that if he (Emerson) could
+write as well as he did, he would write a great deal better, one
+readily sees what he means. And when Thoreau says of one of his
+callers, "I like his looks and the sound of his silence," the
+contradiction pleases one. But when he tells his friend that hate is
+the substratum of his love for him, words seem to have lost their
+meaning. Now and then he is guilty of sheer bragging, as when he says,
+"I would not go around the corner to see the world blow up."
+
+He often defies all our sense of fitness and proportion by the degree
+in which he magnifies the little and belittles the big. He says of the
+singing of a cricket which he heard under the border of some rock on
+the hillside one mid-May day, that it "makes the finest singing of
+birds outward and insignificant." "It is not so wildly melodious, but
+it is wiser and more mature than that of the wood thrush." His forced
+and meaningless analogies come out in such a comparison as this: "Most
+poems, like the fruits, are sweetest toward the blossom end." Which
+_is_ the blossom end of a poem?
+
+Thoreau advised one of his correspondents when he made garden to plant
+some Giant Regrets--they were good for sauce. It is certain that he
+himself planted some Giant Exaggerations and had a good yield. His
+exaggeration was deliberate. "Walden" is from first to last a most
+delightful sample of his talent. He belittles everything that goes on
+in the world outside his bean-field. Business, politics, institutions,
+governments, wars and rumors of wars, were not so much to him as the
+humming of a mosquito in his hut at Walden: "I am as much affected by
+the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour
+through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door
+and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.
+It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air,
+singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical
+about it." One wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly buzzing
+on the pane.
+
+He made Walden Pond famous because he made it the center of the
+universe and found life rich and full without many of the things that
+others deem necessary. There is a stream of pilgrims to Walden at all
+seasons, curious to see where so much came out of so little--where a
+man had lived who preferred poverty to riches, and solitude to
+society, who boasted that he could do without the post office, the
+newspapers, the telegraph, and who had little use for the railroad,
+though he thought mankind had become a little more punctual since its
+invention.
+
+Another conspicuous fault as a writer is his frequent use of false
+analogies, or his comparison of things which have no ground of
+relationship, as when he says: "A day passed in the society of those
+Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not
+be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines, and the
+fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." The word "wit" has no meaning when
+thus used. Or again where he says: "All great enterprises are
+self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his
+poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it
+makes." Was there ever a more inept and untruthful comparison? To find
+any ground of comparison between the two things he compared, he must
+make his poet sustain his body by the scraps and lines of his poem
+which he rejects, or else the steam planing-mill consume its finished
+product.
+
+"Let all things give way to the impulse of expression," he says, and
+he assuredly practiced what he had preached.
+
+One of his tricks of self-justification was to compare himself with
+inanimate objects, which is usually as inept as to compare colors with
+sounds or perfumes: "My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too
+cold," he writes, "but each thing is warm enough of its kind. Is the
+stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and does not
+part with it during the night? Crystals, though they be of ice are not
+too cold to melt.... Crystal does not complain of crystal any more
+than the dove of its mate."
+
+He strikes the same false note when, in discussing the question of
+solitude at Walden he compares himself to the wild animals around him,
+and to inanimate objects, and says he was no more lonely than the
+loons on the pond, or than Walden itself: "I am no more lonely than a
+single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel,
+or a house-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill
+Brook, or a weather-cock, or the North Star, or the South Wind, or an
+April Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in a new house."
+Did he imagine that any of these things were ever lonely? Man does get
+lonely, but Mill Brook and the North Star probably do not.
+
+If he sees anything unusual in nature, like galls on trees and plants,
+he must needs draw some moral from it, usually at the expense of the
+truth. For instance, he implies that the beauty of the oak galls is
+something that was meant to bloom in the flower, that the galls are
+the scarlet sins of the tree, the tree's Ode to Dejection, yet he
+must have known that they are the work of an insect and are as healthy
+a growth as is the regular leaf. The insect gives the magical touch
+that transforms the leaf into a nursery for its young. Why deceive
+ourselves by believing that fiction is more interesting than fact? But
+Thoreau is full of this sort of thing; he must have his analogy, true
+or false.
+
+He says that when a certain philosophical neighbor came to visit him
+in his hut at Walden, their discourse expanded and racked the little
+house: "I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was
+above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its
+seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to
+stop the consequent leak--but I had enough of that kind of oakum
+already picked." At the beginning of the paragraph he says that he and
+his philosopher sat down each with "some shingles of thoughts well
+dried," which they whittled, trying their knives and admiring the
+clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. In a twinkling the three
+shingles of thought are transformed into fishes of thought in a stream
+into which the hermit and the philosopher gently and reverently wade,
+without scaring or disturbing them. Then, presto! the fish become a
+force, like the pressure of a tornado that nearly wrecks his cabin!
+Surely this is tipsy rhetoric, and the work that can stand much of
+it, as "Walden" does, has a plus vitality that is rarely equaled.
+
+VI
+
+In "Walden" Thoreau, in playfully naming his various occupations,
+says, "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
+circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of
+my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my
+labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own
+reward." If he were to come back now, he would, I think, open his eyes
+in astonishment, perhaps with irritation, to see the whole bulk of
+them at last in print.
+
+His Journal was the repository of all his writings, and was drawn upon
+during his lifetime for all the material he printed in books and
+contributed to the magazines. The fourteen volumes, I venture to say,
+form a record of the most minute and painstaking details of what one
+man saw and heard on his walks in field and wood, in a single
+township, that can be found in any literature.
+
+It seems as though a man who keeps a Journal soon becomes its victim;
+at least that seems to have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for
+that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it was like a hungry,
+omnivorous monster that constantly called for more. He transcribed to
+its pages from the books he read, he filled it with interminable
+accounts of the commonplace things he saw in his walks, tedious and
+minute descriptions of everything in wood, field, and swamp. There are
+whole pages of the Latin names of the common weeds and flowers. Often
+he could not wait till he got home to write out his notes. He walked
+by day and night, in cold and heat, in storm and sunshine, all for his
+Journal. All was fish that came to that net; nothing was too
+insignificant to go in. He did not stop to make literature of it, or
+did not try, and it is rarely the raw material of literature. Its
+human interest is slight, its natural history interest slight also.
+For upwards of twenty-five years Thoreau seemed to have lived for this
+Journal. It swelled to many volumes. It is a drag-net that nothing
+escapes. The general reader reads Thoreau's Journal as he does the
+book of Nature, just to cull out the significant things here and
+there. The vast mass of the matter is merely negative, like the things
+that we disregard in our walk. Here and there we see a flower, or a
+tree, or a prospect, or a bird, that arrests attention, but how much
+we pass by or over without giving it a thought! And yet, just as the
+real nature-lover will scan eagerly the fine print in Nature's book,
+so will the student and enthusiast of Thoreau welcome all that is
+recorded in his Journals.
+
+Thoreau says that Channing in their walks together sometimes took out
+his notebook and tried to write as he did, but all in vain. "He soon
+puts it up again, or contents himself with scrawling some sketch of
+the landscape. Observing me still scribbling, he will say that he
+confines himself to the ideal, purely ideal remarks; he leaves the
+facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say, a little petulantly, 'I am
+universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite.'"
+The truth was Channing had no Journal calling, "More, more!" and was
+not so inordinately fond of composition. "I, too," says Thoreau,
+"would fain set down something beside facts. Facts should only be as
+the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology
+which I am writing." But only rarely are his facts significant, or
+capable of an ideal interpretation. Felicitous strokes like that in
+which he says, "No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep
+as the birch," are rare.
+
+Thoreau evidently had a certain companionship with his Journal. It was
+like a home-staying body to whom he told everything on his return from
+a walk. He loved to write it up. He made notes of his observations as
+he went along, night or day. One time he forgot his notebook and so
+substituted a piece of birch-bark. He must bring back something
+gathered on the spot. He skimmed the same country over and over; the
+cream he was after rose every day and all day, and in all seasons.
+
+He evidently loved to see the pages of his Journal sprinkled with the
+Latin names of the plants and animals that he saw in his walk. A
+common weed with a long Latin name acquired new dignity. Occasionally
+he fills whole pages with the scientific names of the common trees and
+plants. He loved also a sprinkling of Latin quotations and allusions
+to old and little known authors. The pride of scholarship was strong
+in him. Suggestions from what we call the heathen world seemed to
+accord with his Gospel of the Wild.
+
+Thoreau loved to write as well as John Muir loved to talk. It was his
+ruling passion. He said time never passed so quickly as when he was
+writing. It seemed as if the clock had been set back. He evidently
+went to Walden for subject-matter for his pen; and the remarkable
+thing about it all is that he was always keyed up to the writing
+pitch. The fever of expression was always upon him. Day and night,
+winter and summer, it raged in his blood. He paused in his walks and
+wrote elaborately. The writing of his Journal must have taken as much
+time as his walking.
+
+Only Thoreau's constant and unquenchable thirst for intellectual
+activity, and to supply material for that all-devouring Journal, can,
+to me, account for his main occupation during the greater part of the
+last two years of his life, which consisted in traversing the woods
+and measuring the trees and stumps and counting their rings.
+Apparently not a stump escaped him--pine, oak, birch, chestnut, maple,
+old or new, in the pasture or in the woods; he must take its measure
+and know its age. He must get the girth of every tree he passed and
+some hint of all the local conditions that had influenced its growth.
+Over two hundred pages of his Journal are taken up with barren details
+of this kind. He cross-questions the stumps and trees as if searching
+for the clue to some important problem, but no such problem is
+disclosed. He ends where he begins. His vast mass of facts and figures
+was incapable of being generalized or systematized. His elaborate
+tables of figures, so carefully arranged, absolutely accurate, no
+doubt, are void of interest, because no valuable inferences can be
+drawn from them.
+
+"I have measured in all eight pitch pine stumps at the Tommy Wheeler
+hollow, sawed off within a foot of the ground. I measured the longest
+diameter and then at right angles with that, and took the average, and
+then selected the side of the stump on which the radius was of average
+length, and counted the number of rings in each inch, beginning at the
+center, thus:" And then follows a table of figures filling a page. "Of
+those eight, average growth about one seventh of an inch per year.
+Calling the smallest number of rings in an inch in each tree one, the
+comparative slowness of growth of the inches is thus expressed." Then
+follows another carefully prepared table of figures. Before one is
+done with these pages one fairly suspects the writer is mad, the
+results are so useless, and so utterly fail to add to our knowledge of
+the woods. Would counting the leaves and branches in the forest, and
+making a pattern of each, and tabulating the whole mass of figures be
+any addition to our knowledge? I attribute the whole procedure, as I
+have said, to his uncontrollable intellectual activity, and the
+imaginary demands of this Journal, which continued to the end of his
+life. The very last pages of his Journal, a year previous to his
+death, are filled with minute accounts of the ordinary behavior of
+kittens, not one item novel or unusual, or throwing any light on the
+kitten. But it kept his mind busy, and added a page or two to the
+Journal.
+
+In his winter walks he usually carried a four-foot stick, marked in
+inches, and would measure the depth of the snow over large areas,
+every tenth step, and then construct pages of elaborate tables showing
+the variations according to locality, and then work out the
+average--an abnormal craving for exact but useless facts. Thirty-four
+measurements on Walden disclosed the important fact that the snow
+averaged five and one sixth inches deep. He analyzes a pensile nest
+which he found in the woods--doubtless one of the vireo's--and fills
+ten pages with a minute description of the different materials which
+it contained. Then he analyzes a yellow-bird's nest, filling two
+pages. That Journal shall not go hungry, even if there is nothing to
+give it but the dry material of a bird's nest.
+
+VII
+
+The craving for literary expression in Thoreau was strong and
+constant, but, as he confesses, he could not always select a theme. "I
+am prepared not so much for contemplation as for forceful expression."
+No matter what the occasion, "forceful expression" was the aim. No
+meditation, or thinking, but sallies of the mind. All his paradoxes
+and false analogies and inconsistencies come from this craving for a
+forceful expression. He apparently brought to bear all the skill he
+possessed of this kind on all occasions. One must regard him, not as a
+great thinker, nor as a disinterested seeker after the truth, but as a
+master in the art of vigorous and picturesque expression. To startle,
+to wake up, to communicate to his reader a little wholesome shock, is
+his aim. Not the novelty and freshness of his subject-matter concerns
+him but the novelty and unhackneyed character of his literary style.
+That throughout the years a man should keep up the habit of walking,
+by night as well as by day, and bring such constant intellectual
+pressure to bear upon everything he saw, or heard, or felt, is
+remarkable. No evidence of relaxation, or of abandonment to the mere
+pleasure of the light and air and of green things growing, or of
+sauntering without thoughts of his Journal. He is as keyed up and
+strenuous in his commerce with the Celestial Empire as any tradesman
+in world goods that ever amassed a fortune. He sometimes wrote as he
+walked, and expanded and elaborated the same as in his study. On one
+occasion he dropped his pencil and could not find it, but he managed
+to complete the record. One night on his way to Conantum he speculates
+for nearly ten printed pages on the secret of being able to state a
+fact simply and adequately, or of making one's self the free organ of
+truth--a subtle and ingenious discussion with the habitual craving for
+forceful expression. In vain I try to put myself in the place of a man
+who goes forth into wild nature with malice prepense to give free
+swing to his passion for forcible expression. I suppose all
+nature-writers go forth on their walks or strolls to the fields and
+woods with minds open to all of Nature's genial influences and
+significant facts and incidents, but rarely, I think, with the
+strenuousness of Thoreau--grinding the grist as they go along.
+
+Thoreau compares himself to the bee that goes forth in quest of honey
+for the hive: "How to extract honey from the flower of the world. That
+is my everyday business. I am as busy as the bee about it. I ramble
+over all fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel
+myself heavy with honey and wax." To get material for his Journal was
+as much his business as it was the bee's to get honey for his comb. He
+apparently did not know that the bee does not get honey nor wax
+directly from the flowers, but only nectar, or sweet water. The bee,
+as I have often said, makes the honey and the wax after she gets home
+to the swarm. She puts the nectar through a process of her own, adds a
+drop of her own secretion to it, namely, formic acid, the water
+evaporates, and lo! the tang and pungency of honey!
+
+VIII
+
+There can be little doubt that in his practical daily life we may credit
+Thoreau with the friendliness and neighborliness that his friend Dr.
+Edward W. Emerson claims for him. In a recent letter to me, Dr. Emerson
+writes: "He carried the old New England undemonstrativeness very far. He
+was also, I believe, really shy, prospered only in monologue, except in
+a walk in the woods with one companion, and his difficulties increased
+to impossibility in a room full of people." Dr. Emerson admits that
+Thoreau is himself to blame for giving his readers the impression that
+he held his kind in contempt, but says that in reality he had
+neighborliness, was dutiful to parents and sisters, showed courtesy to
+women and children and an open, friendly side to many a simple,
+uncultivated townsman.
+
+This practical helpfulness and friendliness in Thoreau's case seems to
+go along with the secret contempt he felt and expressed in his Journal
+toward his fellow townsmen. At one time he was chosen among the
+selectmen to perambulate the town lines--an old annual custom. One day
+they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the
+next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a
+week. Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. "A fatal coarseness is the
+result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been
+associating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I
+feel inexpressibly begrimed." How fragile his self-respect was! Yet he
+had friends among the surrounding farmers, whose society and
+conversation he greatly valued.
+
+That Thoreau gave the impression of being what country folk call a
+crusty person--curt and forbidding in manner--seems pretty well
+established. His friend Alcott says he was deficient in the human
+sentiments. Emerson, who, on the whole, loved and admired him, says:
+"Thoreau sometimes appears only as a _gendarme_, good to knock down a
+cockney with, but without that power to cheer and establish which
+makes the value of a friend." Again he says: "If I knew only Thoreau,
+I should think cooeperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk
+for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
+Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the
+higher gifts,--the insight of the real, or from the real, and the
+moral rectitude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources
+of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after
+year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some
+weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper
+wasted." "It is curious," he again says, "that Thoreau goes to a house
+to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers
+it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any
+of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it,
+and when he has finished his report departs with precipitation."
+
+It is interesting in this connection to put along-side of these rather
+caustic criticisms a remark in kind recorded by Thoreau in his Journal
+concerning Emerson: "Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my
+time--nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where
+there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind--told me what I
+knew--and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to
+oppose him."
+
+Evidently Concord philosophers were not always in concord.
+
+More characteristic of Emerson is the incident Thoreau relates of his
+driving his own calf, which had just come in with the cows, out of the
+yard, thinking it belonged to a drove that was then going by. From all
+accounts Emerson was as slow to recognize his own thoughts when Alcott
+and Channing aired them before him as he was to recognize his own
+calf.
+
+"I have got a load of great hardwood stumps," writes Thoreau, and
+then, as though following out a thought suggested by them, he adds:
+"For sympathy with my neighbors I might about as well live in China.
+They are to me barbarians with their committee works and
+gregariousness."
+
+Probably the stumps were from trees that grew on his neighbors' farms
+and were a gift to him. Let us hope the farmers did not deliver them
+to him free of charge. He complained that the thousand and one
+gentlemen that he met were all alike; he was not cheered by the hope
+of any rudeness from them: "A cross man, a coarse man, an eccentric
+man, a silent man who does not drill well--of him there is some hope,"
+he declares. Herein we get a glimpse of the Thoreau ideal which led
+his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked the human sentiment. He
+may or may not have been a "cross man," but he certainly did not
+"drill well," for which his readers have reason to be thankful.
+Although Thoreau upholds the cross and the coarse man, one would
+really like to know with what grace he would have put up with
+gratuitous discourtesy or insult. I remember an entry in his Journal
+in which he tells of feeling a little cheapened when a neighbor asked
+him to take some handbills and leave them at a certain place as he
+passed on his walk.
+
+A great deal of the piquancy and novelty in Thoreau come from the
+unexpected turn he gives to things, upsetting all our preconceived
+notions. His trick of exaggeration he rather brags of: "Expect no
+trivial truth from me," he says, "unless I am on the witness stand."
+He even exaggerates his own tendency to exaggeration. It is all a part
+of his scheme to startle and wake people up. He exaggerates his likes,
+and he exaggerates his dislikes, and he exaggerates his indifference.
+It is a way he has of bragging. The moment he puts pen to paper the
+imp of exaggeration seizes it. He lived to see the beginning of the
+Civil War, and in a letter to a friend expressed his indifference in
+regard to Fort Sumter and "Old Abe," and all that, yet Mr. Sanborn
+says he was as zealous about the war as any soldier. The John Brown
+tragedy made him sick, and the war so worked upon his feelings that in
+his failing state of health he said he could never get well while it
+lasted. His passion for Nature and the wild carried him to the extent
+of looking with suspicion, if not with positive dislike, upon all of
+man's doings and institutions. All civil and political and social
+organizations received scant justice at his hands. He instantly
+espoused the cause of John Brown and championed him in the most public
+manner because he (Brown) defied the iniquitous laws and fell a martyr
+to the cause of justice and right. If he had lived in our times, one
+would have expected him, in his letters to friends, to pooh-pooh the
+World War that has drenched Europe with blood, while in his heart he
+would probably have been as deeply moved about it as any of us were.
+
+Thoreau must be a stoic, he must be an egotist, he must be illogical,
+whenever he puts pen to paper. This does not mean that he was a
+hypocrite, but it means that on his practical human side he did not
+differ so much from the rest of us, but that in his mental and
+spiritual life he pursued ideal ends with a seriousness that few of us
+are equal to. He loved to take an air-line. In his trips about the
+country to visit distant parts, he usually took the roads and paths or
+means of conveyance that other persons took, but now and then he
+would lay down his ruler on the map, draw a straight line to the
+point he proposed to visit, and follow that, going through the meadows
+and gardens and door-yards of the owners of the property in his line
+of march. There is a tradition that he and Channing once went through
+a house where the front and back door stood open. In his mental
+flights and excursions he follows this plan almost entirely; the hard
+facts and experiences of life trouble him very little. He can always
+ignore them or sail serenely above them.
+
+How is one to reconcile such an expression as this with what his
+friends report of his actual life: "My countrymen are to me
+foreigners. I have but little more sympathy with them than with the
+mobs of India or China"? Or this about his Concord neighbors, as he
+looks down upon them from a near-by hill: "On whatever side I look
+off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have
+lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by
+grovelling, coarse, and low-minded men?--no scenery can redeem it.
+Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as
+men of a similar character." Tried by his ideal standards, his
+neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of course, found wanting,
+yet he went about among them helpful and sympathetic and enjoyed his
+life to the last gasp. These things reveal to us what a gulf there
+may be between a man's actual life and the high altitudes in which he
+disports himself when he lets go his imagination.
+
+IX
+
+In his paper called "Life without Principle," his radical idealism
+comes out: To work for money, or for subsistence alone, is life
+without principle. A man must work for the love of the work. Get a man
+to work for you who is actuated by love for you or for the work alone.
+Find some one to beat your rugs and carpets and clean out your well,
+or weed your onion-patch, who is not influenced by any money
+consideration. This were ideal, indeed; this suggests paradise.
+Thoreau probably loved his lecturing, and his surveying, and his
+magazine writing, and the money these avocations brought him did not
+seem unworthy, but could the business and industrial world safely
+adopt that principle?
+
+So far as I understand him, we all live without principle when we do
+anything that goes against the grain, or for money, or for bread
+alone. "To have done anything by which you earned money is to have
+been truly idle or worse." "If you would get money as a writer or
+lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly."
+Yet his neighbor Emerson was in much demand as a lecturer, and earned
+a good deal of money in that way. Truly idealists like Thoreau are
+hard to satisfy. Agassiz said he could not afford to give his time to
+making money, but how many Agassiz are there in the world at any one
+time? Such a man as our own Edison is influenced very little by the
+commercial value of his inventions. This is as it should be, but only
+a small fraction of mankind do or can live to ideal ends. Those who
+work for love are certainly the lucky ones, and are exceptionally
+endowed. It is love of the sport that usually sends one a-fishing or
+a-hunting, and this gives it the sanction of the Gospel according to
+Thoreau. Bradford Torrey saw a man sitting on a log down in Florida
+who told him, when he asked about his occupation, that he had no time
+to work! It is to be hoped that Thoreau enjoyed his surveying, as he
+probably did, especially when it took him through sphagnum swamps or
+scrub-oak thickets or a tangle of briers and thorns. The more
+difficult the way, the more he could summon his philosophy. "You must
+get your living by loving." It is a hard saying, but it is a part of
+his gospel. But as he on one occasion worked seventy-six days
+surveying, for only one dollar a day, the money he received should not
+be laid up against him.
+
+As a matter of fact we find Thoreau frequently engaging in manual
+labor to earn a little money. He relates in his Journal of 1857 that
+while he was living in the woods he did various jobs about
+town--fence-building, painting, gardening, carpentering:
+
+     One day a man came from the east edge of the town and said
+     that he wanted to get me to brick up a fireplace, etc.,
+     etc., for him. I told him that I was not a mason, but he
+     knew that I had built my own house entirely and would not
+     take no for an answer. So I went.
+
+     It was three miles off, and I walked back and forth each
+     day, arriving early and working as late as if I were living
+     there. The man was gone away most of the time, but had left
+     some sand dug up in his cow-yard for me to make mortar with.
+     I bricked up a fireplace, papered a chamber, but my
+     principal work was whitewashing ceilings. Some were so dirty
+     that many coats would not conceal the dirt. In the kitchen I
+     finally resorted to yellow-wash to cover the dirt. I took my
+     meals there, sitting down with my employer (when he got
+     home) and his hired men. I remember the awful condition of
+     the sink, at which I washed one day, and when I came to look
+     at what was called the towel I passed it by and wiped my
+     hands on the air, and thereafter I resorted to the pump. I
+     worked there hard three days, charging only a dollar a day.
+
+     About the same time I also contracted to build a wood-shed
+     of no mean size, for, I think, exactly six dollars, and
+     cleared about half of it by a close calculation and swift
+     working. The tenant wanted me to throw in a gutter and
+     latch, but I carried off the board that was left and gave
+     him no latch but a button. It stands yet,--behind the Kettle
+     house. I broke up Johnny Kettle's old "trow," in which he
+     kneaded his bread, for material. Going home with what nails
+     were left in a flower [_sic!_] bucket on my arm, in a rain,
+     I was about getting into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella
+     frightened the horse, and he kicked at me over the fills,
+     smashed the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on my back;
+     but while I lay on my back, his leg being caught under the
+     shaft, I got up, to see him sprawling on the other side.
+     This accident, the sudden bending of my body backwards,
+     sprained my stomach so that I did not get quite strong there
+     for several years, but had to give up some fence-building
+     and other work which I had undertaken from time to time.
+
+     I built the common slat fence for $1.50 per rod, or worked
+     for $1.00 per day. I built six fences.
+
+These homely and laborious occupations show the dreamer and
+transcendentalist of Walden in a very interesting light. In his
+practical life he was a ready and resourceful man and could set his
+neighbors a good example, and no doubt give them good advice. But what
+fun he had with his correspondents when they wrote him for practical
+advice about the conduct of their lives! One of them had evidently
+been vexing his soul over the problem of Church and State: "Why not
+make a very large mud pie and bake it in the sun? Only put no Church
+nor State into it, nor upset any other pepper box that way. Dig out a
+woodchuck--for that has nothing to do with rotting institutions. Go
+ahead."
+
+Dear, old-fashioned Wilson Flagg, who wrote pleasantly, but rather
+tamely, about New England birds and seasons, could not profit much
+from Thoreau's criticism: "He wants stirring up with a pole. He should
+practice turning a series of summer-sets rapidly, or jump up and see
+how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down.
+Let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits
+on it as on a grindstone; in short, see how many ideas he can
+entertain at once."
+
+Expect no Poor Richard maxims or counsel from Thoreau. He would tell
+you to invest your savings in the bonds of the Celestial Empire, or
+plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. He says these are
+excellent for sauce. He encourages one of his correspondents with the
+statement that he "never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and
+rolled through a mud puddle; he comes out honor bright from behind
+every storm."
+
+X
+
+All Thoreau's apparent inconsistencies and contradictions come from
+his radical idealism. In all his judgments upon men and things, and
+upon himself, he is an uncompromising idealist. All fall short. Add
+his habit of exaggeration and you have him saying that the pigs in the
+street in New York (in 1843) are the most respectable part of the
+population. The pigs, I suppose, lived up to the pig standard, but the
+people did not live up to the best human standards. Wherever the ideal
+leads him, there he follows. After his brother John's death he said he
+did not wish ever to see John again, but only the ideal John--that
+other John of whom he was but the imperfect representative. Yet the
+loss of the real John was a great blow to him, probably the severest
+in his life. But he never allows himself to go on record as showing
+any human weakness.
+
+"Comparatively," he says, "we can excuse any offense against the
+heart, but not against the imagination." Thoreau probably lived in his
+heart as much as most other persons, but his peculiar gospel is the
+work of his imagination. He could turn his idealism to practical
+account. A man who had been camping with him told me that on such
+expeditions he carried a small piece of cake carefully wrapped up in
+his pocket and that after he had eaten his dinner he would take a
+small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed to do the rest.
+
+The most unpromising subject would often kindle the imagination of
+Thoreau. His imagination fairly runs riot over poor Bill Wheeler, a
+cripple and a sot who stumped along on two clumps for feet, and who
+earned his grog by doing chores here and there. One day Thoreau found
+him asleep in the woods in a low shelter which consisted of meadow hay
+cast over a rude frame. It was a rare find to Thoreau. A man who could
+turn his back upon the town and civilization like that must be some
+great philosopher, greater than Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps
+"from a deep principle," "simplifying life, returning to nature,"
+having put off many things,--"luxuries, comforts, human society, even
+his feet,--wrestling with his thoughts." He outdid himself. He
+out-Thoreaued Thoreau: "Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk
+he indulges, in thought, only in triumphant satires on men? [More
+severe than those of the Walden hermit?] I was not sure for a moment
+but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the
+philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous
+point of view--" with much more to the same effect.
+
+Thoreau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and
+comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and
+austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this
+besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to
+contemplate.
+
+One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender human emotions in
+Thoreau, his stoical indifference is so habitual with him: "I laughed
+at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic
+story." And he excuses himself by saying, "It is not I, but Nature in
+me, which was stronger than I."
+
+It was hard for Thoreau to get interested in young women. He once went
+to an evening party of thirty or forty of them, "in a small room,
+warm and noisy." He was introduced to two of them, but could not hear
+what they said, there was such a cackling. He concludes by saying:
+"The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever
+tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure
+whether they are there or not."
+
+XI
+
+As a philosopher or expositor and interpreter of a principle, Thoreau
+is often simply grotesque. His passion for strong and striking figures
+usually gets the best of him. In discussing the relation that exists
+between the speaker or lecturer and his audience he says, "The
+lecturer will read best those parts of his lecture which are best
+heard," as if the reading did not precede the hearing! Then comes this
+grotesque analogy: "I saw some men unloading molasses-hogsheads from a
+truck at a depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined plane. The
+truckman stood behind and shoved, after putting a couple of ropes, one
+round each end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the depot
+steadily pulled at the ropes. The first man was the lecturer, the last
+was the audience." I suppose the hogshead stands for the big thoughts
+of the speaker which he cannot manage at all without the active
+cooeperation of the audience. The truth is, people assemble in a
+lecture hall in a passive but expectant frame of mind. They are ready
+to be pleased or displeased. They are there like an instrument to be
+played upon by the orator. He may work his will with them. Without
+their sympathy his success will not be great, but the triumph of his
+art is to win their sympathy. Those who went to scoff when the Great
+Preacher spoke, remained to pray. No man could speak as eloquently to
+empty seats, or to a dummy audience, as to a hall filled with
+intelligent people, yet Thoreau's ropes and hogsheads and pulling and
+pushing truckmen absurdly misrepresent the true relation that exists
+between a speaker and his hearers. Of course a speaker finds it uphill
+work if his audience is not with him, but that it is not with him is
+usually his own fault.
+
+Thoreau's merits as a man and a writer are so many and so great that I
+have not hesitated to make much of his defects. Indeed, I have with
+malice aforethought ransacked his works to find them. But after they
+are all charged up against him, the balance that remains on the credit
+side of the account is so great that they do not disturb us.
+
+There has been but one Thoreau, and we should devoutly thank the gods
+of New England for the precious gift. Thoreau's work lives and will
+continue to live because, in the first place, the world loves a writer
+who can flout it and turn his back upon it and yet make good; and
+again because the books which he gave to the world have many and very
+high literary and ethical values. They are fresh, original, and
+stimulating. He drew a gospel out of the wild; he brought messages
+from the wood gods to men; he made a lonely pond in Massachusetts a
+fountain of the purest and most elevating thoughts, and, with his
+great neighbor Emerson, added new luster to a town over which the muse
+of our colonial history had long loved to dwell.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN
+
+I
+
+
+It is never safe to question Darwin's facts, but it is always safe to
+question any man's theories. It is with Darwin's theories that I am
+mainly concerned here. He has already been shorn of his selection
+doctrines as completely as Samson was shorn of his locks, but there
+are other phases of his life and teachings that invite discussion.
+
+The study of Darwin's works begets such an affection for the man, for
+the elements of character displayed on every page, that one is slow in
+convincing one's self that anything is wrong with his theories. There
+is danger that one's critical judgment will be blinded by one's
+partiality for the man.
+
+For the band of brilliant men who surrounded him and championed his
+doctrines--Spencer, Huxley, Lyall, Hooker, and others--one feels
+nothing more personal than admiration; unless the eloquent and
+chivalrous Huxley--the knight in shining armor of the Darwinian
+theory--inspires a warmer feeling. Darwin himself almost disarms one
+by his amazing candor and his utter self-abnegation. The question
+always paramount in his mind is, what is the truth about this matter?
+What fact have you got for me, he seems to say, that will upset my
+conclusion? If you have one, that is just what I am looking for.
+
+Could we have been permitted to gaze upon the earth in the middle
+geologic period, in Jurassic or Triassic times, we should have seen it
+teeming with huge, uncouth, gigantic forms of animal life, in the sea,
+on the land, and in the air, and with many lesser forms, but with no
+sign of man anywhere; ransack the earth from pole to pole and there
+was no sign or suggestion, so far as we could have seen, of a human
+being.
+
+Come down the stream of time several millions of years--to our own
+geologic age--and we find the earth swarming with the human species
+like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found
+in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the
+earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they
+come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that a hand reached down
+from heaven, or up from below, and placed them there. There is no
+alternative but to believe that in some way they arose out of the
+antecedent animal life of the globe; in other words that man is the
+result of the process of evolution, and that all other existing forms
+of life, vegetable and animal, are a product of the same movement.
+
+To explain how this came about, what factors and forces entered into
+the transformation, is the task that Darwin set himself. It was a
+mighty task, and whether or not his solution of the problem stands the
+test of time, we must yet bow in reverence before one of the greatest
+of natural philosophers; for even to have conceived this problem thus
+clearly, and to have placed it in intelligible form before men's
+minds, is a great achievement.
+
+Darwin was as far from being as sure of the truth of Darwinism as many
+of his disciples were, and still are. He said in 1860, in a letter to
+one of his American correspondents, "I have never for a moment doubted
+that, though I cannot see my errors, much of my book ["The Origin of
+Species"] will be proved erroneous." Again he said, in 1862, "I look
+at it as absolutely certain that very much in the 'Origin' will be
+proved rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand."
+
+Its framework is the theory of Evolution, which is very sure to stand.
+In its inception his theory is half-miracle and half-fact. He assumes
+that in the beginning (as if there ever was or could be a "beginning,"
+in that sense) God created a few forms, animal and vegetable, and then
+left it to the gods of Evolution, the chief of which is Natural
+Selection, to do the rest. While Darwin would not admit any
+predetermining factors in Evolution, or that any innate tendency to
+progressive development existed, he said he could not look upon the
+world of living things as the result of chance. Yet in fortuitous, or
+chance, variation he saw one of the chief factors of Evolution.
+
+The world of Chance into which Darwinism delivers us--what can the
+thoughtful mind make of it?
+
+That life with all its myriad forms is the result of chance is,
+according to Professor Osborn, a biological dogma. He everywhere uses
+the word "chance" as opposed to law, or to the sequence of cause and
+effect. This, it seems to me, is a misuse of the term. Is law, in this
+sense, ever suspended or annulled? If one chances to fall off his
+horse or his house, is it not gravity that pulls him down? Are not the
+laws of energy everywhere operative in all movements of matter in the
+material world? Chance is not opposed to law, but to design. Anything
+that befalls us that was not designed is a matter of chance. The
+fortuitous enters largely into all human life. If I carelessly toss a
+stone across the road, it is a matter of chance just where it will
+fall, but its course is not lawless. Does not gravity act upon it?
+does not the resistance of the air act upon it? does not the muscular
+force of my arm act upon it? and does not this complex of physical
+forces determine the precise spot where the stone shall fall? If, in
+its fall, it were to hit a bird or a mouse or a flower, that would be
+a matter of chance, so far as my will was concerned. Is not a meteoric
+stone falling out of space acted upon by similar forces, which
+determine where it shall strike the earth? In this case, we must
+substitute for the energy of my arm the cosmic energy that gives the
+primal impetus to all heavenly bodies. If the falling aerolite were to
+hit a person or a house, we should say it was a matter of chance,
+because it was not planned or designed. But when the shells of the
+long-range guns hit their invisible target or the bombs from the
+airplanes hit their marks, chance plays a part, because all the
+factors that enter into the problem are not and cannot be on the
+instant accurately measured. The collision of two heavenly bodies in
+the depth of space, which does happen, is, from our point of view, a
+matter of chance, although governed by inexorable law.
+
+The forms of inanimate objects--rocks, hills, rivers, lakes--are
+matters of chance, since they serve no purpose: any other form would
+be as fit; but the forms of living things are always purposeful. Is it
+possible to believe that the human body, with all its complicated
+mechanism, its many wonderful organs of secretion and excretion and
+assimilation, is any more matter of chance than a watch or a
+phonograph is? Though what agent to substitute for the word "chance,"
+I confess I do not know. The short cut to an omnipotent Creator
+sitting apart from the thing created will not satisfy the naturalist.
+And to make energy itself creative, as Professor Osborn does, is only
+to substitute one god for another. I can no more think of the course
+of organic evolution as being accidental in the Darwinian sense, than
+I can think of the evolution of the printing-press or the aeroplane as
+being accidental, although chance has played its part. Can we think of
+the first little horse of which we have any record, the eohippus of
+three or four millions of years ago, as evolving by accidental
+variations into the horse of our time, without presupposing an equine
+impulse to development? As well might we trust our ships to the winds
+and waves with the expectation that they will reach their several
+ports.
+
+Are we to believe that we live in an entirely mechanical and
+fortuitous world--a world which has no interior, which is only a maze
+of acting, reacting, and interacting of blind physical forces?
+According to the chance theory, the struggle of a living body to exist
+does not differ from the vicissitudes of, say, water seeking an
+equilibrium, or heat a uniform temperature.
+
+Chance has played an important part in human history, and in all
+life-history--often, no doubt, the main part--since history began. It
+was by chance that Columbus discovered America; he simply blundered
+upon it. He had set out on his voyage with something quite different
+in view. But his ship, and the crew, and the voyage itself, were not
+matters of chance but of purpose.
+
+According to the selectionists' theory, chance gave the bird its
+wings, the fish its fins, the porcupine its quills, the skunk its
+fetid secretion, the cuttlefish its ink, the swordfish its sword, the
+electric eel its powerful battery; it gave the giraffe its long neck,
+the camel its hump, the horse its hoof, the ruminants their horns and
+double stomach, and so on. According to Weismann, it gave us our eyes,
+our ears, our hands with the fingers and opposing thumb, it gave us
+all the complicated and wonderful organs of our bodies, and all their
+circulation, respiration, digestion, assimilation, secretion,
+excretion, reproduction. All we are, or can be, the selectionist
+credits to Natural Selection.
+
+Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, with all its marvelous
+powers and adaptations, as the result of what we call chance or
+Natural Selection. Well may Darwin have said that the eye made him
+shudder when he tried to account for it by Natural Selection. Why, its
+adaptations in one respect alone, minor though they be, are enough to
+stagger any number of selectionists. I refer to the rows of peculiar
+glands that secrete an oily substance, differing in chemical
+composition from any other secretion, a secretion which keeps the
+eyelids from sticking together in sleep. "Behavior as lawless as
+snowflakes," says Whitman--a phrase which probably stuck to him from
+Rousseau; but are snowflakes and raindrops lawless? To us creatures of
+purpose, they are so because the order of their falling is haphazard.
+They obey their own laws. Again we see chance working inside of law.
+
+When the sower scatters the seed-grains from his hand, he does not and
+cannot determine the point of soil upon which any of them shall fall,
+but there is design in his being there and in sowing the seed.
+Astronomy is an exact science, biology is not. The celestial events
+always happen on time. The astronomers can tell us to the fraction of
+a second when the eclipses of the sun and moon and the transit of the
+inferior planets across the sun's disk will take place. They know and
+have measured all the forces that bring them about. Now, if we knew
+with the same mathematical precision all the elements that enter into
+the complex of forces which shapes our lives, could we forecast the
+future with the same accuracy with which the astronomers forecast the
+movements of the orbs? or are there incommensurable factors in life?
+
+II
+
+How are we to reconcile the obvious hit-and-miss method of Nature with
+the reign of law, or with a world of design? Consider the seeds of a
+plant or a tree, as sown by the wind. It is a matter of chance where
+they alight; it is hit or miss with them always. Yet the seeds, say,
+of the cat-tail flag always find the wet or the marshy places. If they
+had a topographical map of the country and a hundred eyes they could
+not succeed better. Of course, there are vastly more failures than
+successes with them, but one success in ten thousand trials is enough.
+They go to all points of the compass with the wind, and sooner or
+later hit the mark. Chance decides where the seed shall fall, but it
+was not chance that gave wings to this and other seeds. The hooks and
+wings and springs and parachutes that wind-sown seeds possess are not
+matters of chance: they all show design. So here is design working in
+a hit-and-miss world.
+
+There are chance details in any general plan. The general forms which
+a maple or an oak or an elm takes in the forest or in the field are
+fixed, but many of the details are quite accidental. All the
+individual trees of a species have a general resemblance, but one
+differs from another in the number and exact distribution of the
+branches, and in many other ways. We cannot solve the fundamental
+problems of biology by addition and subtraction. He who sees nothing
+transcendent and mysterious in the universe does not see deeply; he
+lacks that vision without which the people perish. All organic and
+structural changes are adaptive from the first; they do not need
+natural selection to whip them into shape. All it can do is to serve
+as a weeding-out process.
+
+Acquired characters are not inherited, but those organic changes which
+are the result of the indwelling impulse of development are inherited.
+So dominant and fundamental are the results of this impulse that
+cross-breeding does not wipe them out.
+
+III
+
+While I cannot believe that we live in a world of chance, any more
+than Darwin could, yet I feel that I am as free from any teleological
+taint as he was. The world-old notion of a creator and director,
+sitting apart from the universe and shaping and controlling all its
+affairs, a magnified king or emperor, finds no lodgment in my mind.
+Kings and despots have had their day, both in heaven and on earth. The
+universe is a democracy. The Whole directs the Whole. Every particle
+plays its own part, and yet the universe is a unit as much as is the
+human body, with all its myriad of individual cells, and all its many
+separate organs functioning in harmony. And the mind I see in nature
+is just as obvious as the mind I see in myself, and subject to the
+same imperfections and limitations.
+
+In following Lamarck I am not disturbed by the bogey of teleology, or
+the ghost of mysticism. I am persuaded that there is something
+immanent in the universe, pervading every atom and molecule in it,
+that knows what it wants--a Cosmic Mind or Intelligence that we must
+take account of if we would make any headway in trying to understand
+the world in which we find ourselves.
+
+When we deny God it is always in behalf of some other god. We are
+compelled to recognize something not ourselves from which we proceed,
+and in which we live and move and have our being, call it energy, or
+will, or Jehovah, or Ancient of Days. We cannot deny it because we are
+a part of it. As well might the fountain deny the sea or the cloud.
+Each of us is a fraction of the universal Eternal Intelligence. Is it
+unscientific to believe that our own minds have their counterpart or
+their origin in the nature of which we form a part? Is our own
+intelligence all there is of mind-manifestation in the universe? Where
+did we get this divine gift? Did we take all there was of it?
+Certainly we did not ourselves invent it. It would require
+considerable wit to do that. Mind is immanent in nature, but in man
+alone it becomes self-conscious. Wherever there is adaptation of means
+to an end, there is mind.
+
+Yet we use the terms "guidance," "predetermination," and so on, at the
+risk of being misunderstood. All such terms are charged with the
+meaning that our daily lives impart to them and, when applied to the
+processes of the Cosmos, are only half-truths. From our experience
+with objects and forces in this world, the earth ought to rest upon
+something, and that object upon something, and the moon ought to fall
+upon the earth, and the earth fall into the sun, and, in fact, the
+whole sidereal system ought to collapse. But it does not, and will
+not. As nearly as we can put it into words, the whole visible universe
+floats in a boundless and fathomless sea of energy; and that is all we
+know about it.
+
+If chance brought us here and endowed us with our bodies and our
+minds, and keeps us here, and adapts us to the world in which we live,
+is not Chance a good enough god for any of us? Or if Natural Selection
+did it, or orthogenesis or epigenesis, or any other genesis, have we
+not in any of these found a god equal to the occasion? Darwin goes
+wrong, if I may be allowed to say so, when he describes or
+characterizes the activities of Nature in terms of our own activities.
+Man's selection affords no clue to Nature's selection, and the best to
+man is not the best to Nature. For instance, she is concerned with
+color and form only so far as they have survival value. We are
+concerned more with intrinsic values.
+
+"Man," says Darwin, "selects only for his own good; Nature only for
+the good of the being which she tends." But Nature's good is of
+another order than man's: it is the good of all. Nature aims at a
+general good, man at a particular good to himself. Man waters his
+garden; Nature sends the rain broadcast upon the just and the unjust,
+upon the sea as upon the land. Man directs and controls his planting
+and his harvesting along specific lines: he selects his seed and
+prepares his soil; Nature has no system in this respect: she trusts
+her seeds to the winds and the waters, and to beasts and birds, and
+her harvest rarely fails.
+
+Nature's methods, we say, are blind, haphazard; the wind blows where
+it listeth, and the seeds fall where the winds and waters carry them;
+the frosts blight this section and spare that; the rains flood the
+country in the West and the drought burns up the vegetation in the
+East. And yet we survive and prosper. Nature averages up well. We see
+nothing like purpose or will in her total scheme of things, yet inside
+her hit-and-miss methods, her storms and tornadoes and earthquakes and
+distempers, we see a fundamental benefaction. If it is not good-will,
+it amounts to the same thing. Our fathers saw special providences, but
+we see only unchangeable laws. To compare Nature's selection with
+man's selection is like arguing from man's art to Nature's art.
+Nature has no art, no architecture, no music. Her temples, as the
+poets tell us, are the woods, her harps the branches of the trees, her
+minstrels the birds and insects, her gardens the fields and
+waysides--all safe comparisons for purposes of literature, but not for
+purposes of science.
+
+Man alone selects, or works by a definite method. Might we not as well
+say that Nature ploughs and plants and trims and harvests? We pick out
+our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our
+purpose. We go straight to our object, with as little delay and waste
+as possible. Not so Nature. Her course is always a round-about one.
+Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Our choice selection of
+rich milkers, prolific poultry, or heavy-fleeced sheep is with her
+quickly sacrificed for the qualities of strength and cunning and
+speed, as these alone have survival value. Man wants specific results
+at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled
+only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of
+her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome.
+
+What is called Darwinism is entirely an anthropomorphic view of
+Nature--Nature humanized and doing as man does. What is called Natural
+Selection is man's selection read into animate nature. We see in
+nature what we have to call intelligence--the adaptation of means to
+ends. We see purpose in all living things, but not in the same sense
+in non-living things. The purpose is not in the light, but in the eye;
+in the ear, but not in the sound; in the lungs, and not in the air; in
+the stomach, and not in the food; in the various organs of the body,
+and not in the forces that surround and act upon it. We cannot say
+that the purpose of the clouds is to bring rain, or of the sun to give
+light and warmth, in the sense that we can say it is the purpose of
+the eyelid to protect the eye, of the teeth to masticate the food, or
+of the varnish upon the leaves to protect the leaves.
+
+The world was not made for us, but we are here because the world was
+made as it is. We are the secondary fact and not the primary. Nature
+is non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scientific, though it is
+from her that we get our ideas of all these things. All parts and
+organs of living bodies have, or have had, a purpose. Nature is blind,
+but she knows what she wants and she gets it. She is blind, I say,
+because she is all eyes, and sees through the buds of her trees and
+the rootlets of her plants as well as by the optic nerves in her
+animals. And, though I believe that the accumulation of variations is
+the key to new species, yet this accumulation is not based upon
+outward utility but upon an innate tendency to development--the push
+of life, or creative evolution, as Bergson names it; not primarily
+because the variations are advantages, but because the formation of a
+new species is such a slow process, stretches over such a period of
+geologic time, that the slight variations from generation to
+generation could have no survival value. The primary factor is the
+inherent tendency to development. The origin of species is on a scale
+of time of enormous magnitude. What takes place among our domestic
+animals of a summer day is by no means a safe guide as to what befell
+their ancestors in the abysses of geologic time. It is true that
+Nature may be read in the little as well as in the big,--_Natura in
+minimis existat_,--in the gnat as well as in the elephant; but she
+cannot be read in our yearly calendars as she can in the calendars of
+the geologic strata. Species go out and species come in; the book of
+natural revelation opens and closes at chance places, and rarely do we
+get a continuous record--in no other case more clearly than in that of
+the horse.
+
+The horse was a horse, from the first five-toed animal in Eocene
+times, millions of years ago, through all the intermediate forms of
+four-toed and three-toed, down to the one-toed superb creature of our
+own day. Amid all the hazards and delays of that vast stretch of time,
+one may say, the horse-impulse never faltered. The survival value of
+the slight gains in size and strength from millennium to millennium
+could have played no part. It was the indwelling necessity toward
+development that determined the issue. This assertion does not deliver
+us into the hands of teleology, but is based upon the idea that
+ontogeny and phylogeny are under the same law of growth. In the little
+eohippus was potentially the horse we know, as surely as the oak is
+potential in the acorn, or the bird potential in the egg, whatever
+element of mystery may enter into the problem.
+
+In fields where speed wins, the fleetest are the fittest. In fields
+where strength wins, the strongest are the fittest. In fields where
+sense-acuteness wins, the keenest of eye, ears, and nose are the
+fittest.
+
+When we come to the race of man, the fittest to survive, from our
+moral and intellectual point of view, is not always the best. The
+lower orders of humanity are usually better fitted to survive than the
+higher orders--they are much more prolific and adaptive. The tares are
+better fitted to survive than the wheat. Every man's hand is against
+the weeds, and every man's hand gives a lift to the corn and the
+wheat, but the weeds do not fail. There is nothing like original sin
+to keep a man or a plant going. Emerson's gardener was probably better
+fitted to survive than Emerson; Newton's butler than Newton himself.
+
+Most naturalists will side with Darwin in rejecting the idea of Asa
+Gray, that the stream of variation has been guided by a higher power,
+unless they think of the will of this power as inherent in every
+molecule of matter; but guidance in the usual theological sense is not
+to be thought of; the principle of guidance cannot be separated from
+the thing guided. It recalls a parable of Charles Kingsley's which he
+related to Huxley. A heathen khan in Tartary was visited by a pair of
+proselytizing moollahs. The first moollah said, "O Khan, worship my
+god. He is so wise that he made all things!" Moollah Number Two said,
+"O Khan, worship my god. He is so wise that he makes all things make
+themselves!" Number Two won the day.
+
+IV
+
+How often it turns out that a man's minor works outlive his major!
+This is true in both literature and science, but more often in the
+former than in the latter. Darwin furnishes a case in the field of
+science. He evidently looked upon his "Origin of Species" as his great
+contribution to biological science; but it is highly probable that his
+"Voyage of the Beagle" will outlast all his other books. The "Voyage"
+is of perennial interest and finds new readers in each generation. I
+find myself re-reading it every eight or ten years. I have lately read
+it for the fourth time. It is not an argument or a polemic; it is a
+personal narrative of a disinterested yet keen observer, and is
+always fresh and satisfying. For the first time we see a comparatively
+unknown country like South America through the eyes of a born and
+trained naturalist. It is the one book of his that makes a wide appeal
+and touches life and nature the most closely.
+
+We may say that Darwin was a Darwinian from the first,--a naturalist
+and a philosopher combined,--and was predisposed to look at animate
+nature in the way his works have since made us familiar with.
+
+In his trip on the Beagle he saw from the start with the eyes of a
+born evolutionist. In South America he saw the fossil remains of the
+Toxodon, and observed, "How wonderful are the different orders, at the
+present time so well separated, blended together in the different
+points of the structure of the Toxodon!" All forms of life attracted
+him. He looked into the brine-pans of Lymington and found that water
+with one quarter of a pound of salt to the pint was inhabited, and he
+was led to say: "Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+habitable! Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean ones hidden
+beneath volcanic mountains,--warm mineral springs,--the wide expanse
+and depth of the ocean,--the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even
+the surface of perpetual snow,--all support organic beings."
+
+He studies the parasitical habit of the cuckoo and hits on an
+explanation of it. He speculates why the partridges and deer in South
+America are so tame.
+
+His "Voyage of the Beagle" alone would insure him lasting fame. It is
+a classic among scientific books of travel. Here is a traveler of a
+new kind: a natural-history voyager, a man bent on seeing and taking
+note of everything going on in nature about him, in the non-human, as
+well as in the human world. The minuteness of his observation and the
+significance of its subject-matter are a lesson to all observers.
+Darwin's interests are so varied and genuine. One sees in this volume
+the seed-bed of much of his subsequent work. He was quite a young man
+(twenty-four) when he made this voyage; he was ill more than half the
+time; he was as yet only an observer and appreciator of Nature, quite
+free from any theories about her ways and methods. He says that this
+was by far the most important event of his life and determined his
+whole career. His theory of descent was already latent in his mind, as
+is evinced by an observation he made about the relationship in South
+America between the extinct and the living forms. "This relationship,"
+he said, "will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the
+appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance
+from it, than any other class of facts."
+
+He looked into the muddy waters of the sea off the coast of Chile, and
+found a curious new form of minute life--microscopic animals that
+exploded as they swam through the water. In South America he saw an
+intimate relationship between the extinct species of ant-eaters,
+armadillos, tapirs, peccaries, guanacos, opossums, and so on, and the
+living species of these animals; and he adds that the wonderful
+relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living
+would doubtless hereafter throw more light on the appearance of
+organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any
+other class of facts.
+
+His observation of the evidences of the rise and fall of thousands of
+feet of the earth along the Cordilleras leads him to make this rather
+startling statement: "Daily it is forced home on the mind of the
+geologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable
+as the level of the crust of the earth."
+
+There is now and then a twinkle of humor in Darwin's eyes, as when he
+says that in the high altitude of the Andes the inhabitants recommend
+onions for the "puna," or shortness of breath, but that he found
+nothing so good as fossil shells.
+
+Water boils at such a low temperature in the high Andes that potatoes
+will not cook if boiled all night. Darwin heard his guides discussing
+the cause. "They had come to the simple conclusion that 'the cursed
+pot' (which was a new one) did not choose to boil potatoes."
+
+In all Darwin's record we see that the book of nature, which ordinary
+travelers barely glance at, he opened and carefully perused.
+
+V
+
+Natural Selection turns out to be of only secondary importance. It is
+not creative, but only confirmative. It is a weeding-out process; it
+is Nature's way of improving the stock. Its tendency is to make
+species more and more hardy and virile. The weak and insufficiently
+endowed among all forms tend to drop out. Life to all creatures is
+more or less a struggle, a struggle with the environment, with the
+inorganic forces,--storm, heat, cold, sterile land, and engulfing
+floods,--and it is a struggle with competing forms for food and
+shelter and a place in the sun. The strongest, the most amply endowed
+with what we call vitality or power to live, win. Species have come to
+be what they are through this process. Immunity from disease comes
+through this fight for life; and adaptability--through trial and
+struggle species adapt themselves, as do our own bodies, to new and
+severe conditions. The naturally weak fall by the wayside as in an
+army on a forced march.
+
+Every creature becomes the stronger by the opposition it overcomes.
+Natural Selection gives speed, where speed is the condition of
+safety, strength where strength is the condition, keenness and
+quickness of sense-perception where these are demanded. Natural
+Selection works upon these attributes and tends to perfect them. Any
+group of men or beasts or birds brought under any unusual strain from
+cold, hunger, labor, effort, will undergo a weeding-out process.
+Populate the land with more animal life than it can support, or with
+more vegetable forms than it can sustain, and a weeding-out process
+will begin. A fuller measure of vitality, or a certain hardiness and
+toughness, will enable some species to hold on longer than others,
+and, maybe, keep up the fight till the struggle lessens and victory is
+won.
+
+The flame of life is easily blown out in certain forms, and is very
+tenacious in others. How unequally the power to resist cold, for
+instance, seems to be distributed among plants and trees, and probably
+among animals! One spring an unseasonable cold snap in May (mercury
+28) killed or withered about one per cent of the leaves on the lilacs,
+and one tenth of one per cent of the leaves of our crab-apple tree. In
+the woods around Slabsides I observed that nearly half the plants of
+Solomon's-seal (_Polygonatum_) and false Solomon's-seal (_Smilacina_)
+were withered. The vital power, the power to live, seems stronger in
+some plants than in others of the same kind. I suppose this law holds
+throughout animate nature. When a strain of any kind comes, these
+weaker ones drop out. In reading the stories of Arctic explorers, I
+see this process going on among their dog-teams: some have greater
+power of endurance than others. A few are constantly dropping out or
+falling by the wayside. With an army on a forced march the same thing
+happens. In the struggle for existence the weak go to the wall. Of
+course the struggle among animals is at least a toughening process. It
+seems as if the old Indian legend, that the strength of the foe
+overcome passes into the victor, were true. But how a new species
+could arrive as the result of such struggle is past finding out.
+Variation with all forms of life is more or less constant, but it is
+around a given mean. Only those acquired characters are transmitted
+that arise from the needs of the organism.
+
+A vast number of changes in plants and animals are superficial and in
+no way vital. It is hard to find two leaves of the same tree that will
+exactly coincide in all their details; but a difference that was in
+some way a decided advantage would tend to be inherited and passed
+along. It is said that the rabbits in Australia have developed a
+longer and stronger nail on the first toe of each front foot, which
+aids them in climbing over the wire fences. The aye-aye has a
+specially adapted finger for extracting insects from their
+hiding-places. Undoubtedly such things are inherited. The snowshoes
+of the partridge and rabbit are inherited. The needs of the organism
+influence structure. The spines in the quills in the tails of
+woodpeckers, and in the brown creeper, are other cases in point. The
+nuthatch has no spines on its tail, because it can move in all
+directions, as well with head down as with head up. I have read of a
+serpent somewhere that feeds upon eggs. As the serpent has no lips or
+distendable cheeks, and as its mechanism of deglutition acts very
+slowly, an egg crushed in the mouth would be mostly spilled. So the
+eggs are swallowed whole; but in the throat they come in contact with
+sharp tooth-like spines, which are not teeth, but downward projections
+from the backbone, and which serve to break the shells of the eggs.
+Radical or vital variations are rare, and we do not witness them any
+more than we witness the birth of a new species. And that is all there
+is to Natural Selection. It is a name for a process of elimination
+which is constantly going on in animate nature all about us. It is in
+no sense creative, it originates nothing, but clinches and toughens
+existing forms.
+
+The mutation theory of De Vries is a much more convincing theory of
+the origin of species than is Darwin's Natural Selection. If things
+would only mutate a little oftener! But they seem very reluctant to do
+so. There does seem to have been some mutation among plants,--De
+Vries has discovered several such,--but in animal life where are the
+mutants? When or where has a new species originated in this way?
+Surely not during the historic period.
+
+Fluctuations are in all directions around a center--the mean is always
+returned to; but mutations, or the progressive steps in evolution, are
+divergent lines away from the center. Fluctuations are superficial and
+of little significance; but mutations, if they occur, involve
+deep-seated, fundamental factors, factors more or less responsive to
+the environment, but not called into being by it. Of the four factors
+in the Darwinian formula,--variation, heredity, the struggle, and
+natural selection,--variation is the most negligible; it furnishes an
+insufficient handle for selection to take hold of. Something more
+radical must lead the way to new species.
+
+As applied to species, the fittest to survive is a misleading term.
+All are fit to survive from the fact that they do survive. In a world
+where, as a rule, the race is to the swift and the battle to the
+strong, the slow and the frail also survive because they do not come
+in competition with the swift and the strong. Nature mothers all, and
+assigns to each its sphere.
+
+The Darwinians are hostile to Lamarck with his inner developing and
+perfecting principle, and, by the same token, to Aristotle, who is
+the father of the theory. They regard organic evolution as a purely
+mechanical process.
+
+Variation can work only upon a variable tendency--an inherent impulse
+to development. A rock, a hill, a stream, may change, but it is not
+variable in the biological sense: it can never become anything but a
+rock, a hill, a stream; but a flower, an egg, a seed, a plant, a baby,
+can. What I mean to say is that there must be the primordial tendency
+to development which Natural Selection is powerless to beget, and
+which it can only speed up or augment. It cannot give the wing to the
+seed, or the spring, or the hook; or the feather to the bird; or the
+scale to the fish; but it can perfect all these things. The fittest of
+its kind does stand the best chance to survive.
+
+VI
+
+After we have Darwin shorn of his selection theories, what has he
+left? His significance is not lessened. He is still the most
+impressive figure in modern biological science. His attitude of mind,
+the problems he tackled, his methods of work, the nature and scope of
+his inquiries, together with his candor, and his simplicity and
+devotion to truth, are a precious heritage to all mankind.
+
+Darwin's work is monumental because he belongs to the class of
+monumental men. The doctrine of evolution as applied to animate
+nature reached its complete evolution in his mind. He stated the
+theory in broader and fuller terms than had any man before him; he
+made it cover the whole stupendous course of evolution. He showed man
+once for all an integral part of the zooelogic system. He elevated
+natural history, or biology, to the ranks of the great sciences, a
+worthy member of the triumvirate--astronomy, geology, biology. He
+taught us how to cross-question the very gods of life in their council
+chambers; he showed us what significance attaches to the simplest
+facts of natural history.
+
+Darwin impresses by his personality not less than by his logic and his
+vast storehouse of observations. He was a great man before he was a
+great natural-history philosopher. His patient and painstaking
+observation is a lesson to all nature students. The minutest facts
+engaged him. He studies the difference between the stamens of the same
+plant. He counted nine thousand seeds, one by one, from artificially
+fertilized pods. Plants from two pollens, he says, grow at different
+rates. Any difference in the position of the pistil, or in the size
+and color of the stamens, in individuals of the same species grown
+together, was of keen interest to him.
+
+The best thing about Darwinism is Darwin--his candor, his patience,
+his simplicity, his devotion to truth, and his power of observation.
+This is about what Professor T. H. Morgan meant when he said: "It is
+the spirit of Darwinism, not its formulae, that we proclaim as our best
+heritage." He gave us a new point of view of the drama of creation; he
+gave us ideas that are applicable to the whole domain of human
+activities. It is true, he was not a pioneer in this field: he did not
+blaze the first trail through this wilderness of biological facts and
+records; rather was he like a master-engineer who surveys and
+establishes the great highway. All the world now travels along the
+course he established and perfected. He made the long road of
+evolution easy, and he placed upon permanent foundations the doctrine
+of the animal origin of man. He taught the world to think in terms of
+evolution, and he pointed the way to a rational explanation of the
+diversity of living forms.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+WHAT MAKES A POEM?
+
+
+Pope said that a middling poet was no poet at all. Middling things in
+art or in any field of human endeavor do not arouse our enthusiasm,
+and it is enthusiasm that fans the fires of life. There are all
+degrees of excellence, but in poetry one is always looking for the
+best. Pope himself holds a place in English literature which he could
+not hold had he been only a middling poet. He is not a poet of the
+highest order certainly, but a poet of the third or fourth order--the
+poet of the reason, the understanding, but not of the creative
+imagination. It is wit and not soul that keeps Pope alive.
+
+Nearly every age and land has plenty of middling poets. Probably there
+were never more of them in the land than there are to-day. Scores of
+volumes of middling verse are issued from the press every week. The
+magazines all have middling verse; only at rare intervals do they have
+something more. The May "Atlantic," for instance, had a poem by a (to
+me) comparatively new writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, that one would
+hardly stigmatize as middling poetry. Let the reader judge for
+himself. It is called "Spring in the Study." I quote only the second
+part:
+
+    "What is this sudden gayety that shakes the grayest boughs?
+    A voice is calling fieldward--'T is time to start the ploughs!
+    To set the furrows rolling, while all the old crows nod;
+    And deep as life, the kernel, to cut the golden sod.
+    The pen--let nations have it;--we'll plough a while for God.
+
+    "When half the things that must be done are greater than our art,
+    And half the things that must be done are smaller than our heart,
+    And poorest gifts are dear to burn on altars unrevealed,
+    Like music comes the summons, the challenge from the weald!
+    'They tread immortal measures who make a mellow field!'
+
+    "The planet's rather pleasant, alluring in its way;
+    But let the ploughs be idle and none of us can stay.
+    Here's where there is no doubting, no ghosts uncertain stalk,
+    A-traveling with the plough beam, beneath the sailing hawk,
+    Cutting the furrow deep and true where Destiny will walk."
+
+Lafcadio Hearn spoke with deep truth when he said that "the measure of
+a poet is the largeness of thought which he can bring to any subject,
+however trifling." Certainly Mrs. Dargan brings this largeness of
+thought to her subject. Has the significance of the plough ever before
+been so brought out? She makes one feel that there should be a plough
+among the constellations. What are the chairs and harps and dippers in
+comparison?
+
+The poetry of mere talent is always middling poetry--"poems distilled
+from other poems," as Whitman says. The work of a genius is of a
+different order. Most current verse is merely sweetened prose put up
+in verse form. It serves its purpose; the mass of readers like it.
+Nearly all educated persons can turn it off with little effort. I have
+done my share of it myself--rhymed natural history, but not poetry.
+"Waiting" is my nearest approach to a true poem.
+
+Wordsworth quotes Aristotle as saying that poetry is the most
+philosophical of all writing, and Wordsworth agrees with him. There
+certainly can be no great poetry without a great philosopher behind
+it--a man who has thought and felt profoundly upon nature and upon
+life, as Wordsworth himself surely had. The true poet, like the
+philosopher, is a searcher after truth, and a searcher at the very
+heart of things--not cold, objective truth, but truth which is its own
+testimony, and which is carried alive into the heart by passion. He
+seeks more than beauty, he seeks the perennial source of beauty. The
+poet leads man to nature as a mother leads her child there--to instill
+a love of it into his heart. If a poet adds neither to my knowledge
+nor to my love, of what use is he? For instance, Poe does not make me
+know more or love more, but he delights me by his consummate art.
+Bryant's long poem "The Ages" has little value, mainly because it is
+charged with no philosophy, and no imaginative emotion. His "Lines to
+a Waterfowl" will last because of the simple, profound human emotion
+they awaken. The poem is marred, however, by the stanza that he tacks
+on the end, which strikes a note entirely foreign to the true spirit
+of the poem. You cannot by tacking a moral to a poem give it the
+philosophical breadth to which I have referred. "Thanatopsis" has a
+solemn and majestic music, but not the unique excellence of the
+waterfowl poem. Yet it may be generally said of Bryant that he has a
+broad human outlook on life and is free from the subtleties and
+ingenious refinements of many of our younger poets.
+
+I know of only three poets in this century who bring a large measure
+of thought and emotion to their task. I refer to William Vaughn Moody,
+to John Russell McCarthy (author of "Out-of-Doors" and "Gods and
+Devils"), and to Robert Loveman, best known for his felicitous "Rain
+Song," a poem too well known to be quoted here. Any poet who has ever
+lived might have been proud to have written that poem. It goes as
+lightly as thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its philosophy
+is so sublimated and so natural and easy that we are likely to forget
+that it has any philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his
+"Gates of Silence" are probably far less well known. Let me quote a
+few of them:
+
+    "The races rise and fall,
+      The nations come and go,
+    Time tenderly doth cover all
+      With violets and snow.
+
+    "The mortal tide moves on
+      To some immortal shore,
+    Past purple peaks of dusk and dawn,
+      Into the evermore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "All the tomes of all the tribes,
+    All the songs of all the scribes,
+    All that priest and prophet say,
+    What is it? and what are they?
+
+    "Fancies futile, feeble, vain,
+    Idle dream-drift of the brain,--
+    As of old the mystery
+    Doth encompass you and me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "Old and yet young, the jocund Earth
+      Doth speed among the spheres,
+    Her children of imperial birth
+      Are all the golden years.
+
+    "The happy orb sweeps on,
+      Led by some vague unrest,
+    Some mystic hint of joys unborn
+      Springing within her breast."
+
+What takes one in "The Gates of Silence," which, of course, means the
+gates of death, are the large, sweeping views. The poet strides
+through time and space like a Colossus and
+
+                              "flings
+      Out of his spendthrift hands
+    The whirling worlds like pebbles,
+      The meshed stars like sands."
+
+Loveman's stanzas have not the flexibility and freedom of those of
+Moody and McCarthy, but they bring in full measure the largeness of
+thought which a true poem requires.
+
+Some of Moody's poems rank with the best in the literature of his time.
+He was deeply moved by the part we played in the Spanish-American War.
+It was a war of shame and plunder from the point of view of many of the
+noblest and most patriotic men of the country. We freed Cuba from the
+Spanish yoke and left her free; but we seized the Philippines and
+subdued the native population by killing a vast number of them--more
+than half of them, some say. Commercial exploitation inspired our
+policy. How eloquently Senator Hoar of Massachusetts inveighed against
+our course! We promised the Filipinos their freedom--a promise we have
+not yet fulfilled.
+
+Moody's most notable poems are "Gloucester Moors," "An Ode in Time of
+Hesitation" (inspired by the Shaw Monument in Boston, the work of
+Saint-Gaudens), "The Brute," "The Daguerreotype," and "On a Soldier
+Fallen in the Philippines." In this last poem throb and surge the
+mingled emotions of pride and shame which the best minds in the
+country felt at the time--shame at our mercenary course, and pride in
+the fine behavior of our soldiers. It is true we made some pretense of
+indemnifying Spain by paying her twenty million dollars, which was
+much like the course of a boy who throws another boy down and
+forcibly takes his jack-knife from him, then gives him a few coppers
+to salve his wounds. I remember giving Moody's poem to Charles Eliot
+Norton (one of those who opposed the war), shortly after it appeared.
+He read it aloud with marked emotion. Let me quote two of its stanzas:
+
+          "Toll! Let the great bells toll
+          Till the clashing air is dim.
+          Did we wrong this parted soul?
+          We will make it up to him.
+          Toll! Let him never guess
+          What work we set him to.
+          Laurel, laurel, yes;
+          He did what we bade him do.
+    Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;
+    Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own
+              heart's-blood.
+
+          "A flag for the soldier's bier
+          Who dies that his land may live;
+          O, banners, banners here,
+          That he doubt not nor misgive!
+          That he heed not from the tomb
+          The evil days draw near
+          When the nation, robed in gloom,
+          With its faithless past shall strive.
+    Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island
+              mark,
+    Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in
+              the dark."
+
+When I say that every true poet must have a philosophy, I do not mean
+that he must be what is commonly called a philosophical poet; from
+such we steer clear. The philosophy in a poem must be like the iron in
+the blood. It is the iron that gives color and vigor to the blood.
+Reduce it and we become an anaemic and feeble race. Much of the popular
+poetry is anaemic in this respect. There is no virile thought in it.
+All of which amounts to saying that there is always a great nature
+back of a great poem.
+
+The various forms of verse are skillfully used by an increasing number
+of educated persons, but the number of true poets is not increasing.
+Quite the contrary, I fear. The spirit of the times in which we live
+does not favor meditation and absorption in the basic things out of
+which great poetry arises. "The world is too much with us." Yet we
+need not be too much discouraged. England has produced Masefield, and
+we have produced John Russell McCarthy, who has written the best
+nature poetry since Emerson. The genius of a race does not repeat. We
+shall never again produce poets of the type of those that are gone,
+and we should not want to. All we may hope for is to produce poets as
+original and characteristic and genuine as those of the past--poets
+who as truly express the spirit of their time, as the greater poets
+did of theirs--not Emerson and Whitman over again, but a wide
+departure from their types.
+
+Speaking of Whitman, may we not affirm that it is his tremendous and
+impassioned philosophy suffusing his work, as the blood suffuses the
+body, that keeps "Leaves of Grass" forever fresh? We do not go to
+Whitman for pretty flowers of poesy, although they are there, but we
+go to him for his attitude toward life and the universe, we go to
+stimulate and fortify our souls--in short, for his cosmic philosophy
+incarnated in a man.
+
+What largeness of thought Tennyson brings to all his themes! There is
+plenty of iron in his blood, though it be the blood of generations of
+culture, and of an overripe civilization. We cannot say as much of
+Swinburne's poetry or prose. I do not think either will live. Bigness
+of words, and fluency, and copiousness of verse cannot make up for the
+want of a sane and rational philosophy. Arnold's poems always have
+real and tangible subject matter. His "Dover Beach" is a great stroke
+of poetic genius. Let me return to Poe: what largeness of thought did
+he bring to his subjects? Emerson spoke of him as "the jingle man,"
+and Poe, in turn, spoke of Emerson with undisguised contempt. Poe's
+picture indicates a neurotic person. There is power in his eyes, but
+the shape of his head is abnormal, and a profound melancholy seems to
+rest on his very soul. What a conjurer he was with words and meters
+and measures! No substance at all in his "Raven," only shadows--a
+wonderful dance of shadows, all tricks of a verbal wizard. "The
+Bells," a really powerful poem, is his masterpiece, unique in English
+literature; but it has no intellectual content. Its appeal is to the
+eye and ear alone. It has a verbal splendor and a mastery over measure
+and rhythm far beyond anything in Shelley, or in any other poet of his
+time. It is art glorified; it is full of poetic energy. No wonder
+foreign critics see in Poe something far beyond that found in any
+other American, or in any British poet!
+
+Poe set to work to write "The Raven" as deliberately as a mechanic
+goes to work to make a machine, or an architect to build a house. It
+was all a matter of calculation with him. He did not believe in long
+poems, hence decided at the outset that his poem should not be more
+than one hundred lines in length. Then he asked himself, what is the
+legitimate end and aim of a poem? and answered emphatically, Beauty.
+The next point to settle was, what impression must be made to produce
+that effect? He decided that "melancholy is the most legitimate of all
+poetic tones." Why joy or gladness, like that of the birds, is not
+equally legitimate, he does not explain. Then, to give artistic
+piquancy to the whole, he decided that there must be "some pivot upon
+which the whole structure might turn." He found that "no one had been
+so universally employed as the refrain." The burden of the poem should
+be given by the refrain, and it should be a monotone, and should have
+brevity. Then his task was to select a single word that would be in
+keeping with the melancholy at which he was aiming, and this he found
+in the word _nevermore_. He next invented a pretext for the frequent
+but varying use of _nevermore_. This word could not be spoken in the
+right tone by a human being; it must come from an unreasoning
+creature, hence the introduction of the raven, an ill-omened bird, in
+harmony with the main tone of the poem. He then considered what was
+the most melancholy subject of mankind, and found it was death, and
+that that melancholy theme was most poetical when allied to beauty.
+Hence the death of a beautiful woman was unquestionably the most
+poetic topic in the world. It was equally beyond doubt that the lips
+best suited for such topic were those of a bereaved lover. Thus he
+worked himself up, or rather back, to the climax of the poem, for he
+wrote the last stanza, in which the climax occurs, first. His own
+analysis of the poem is like a chemist's analysis of some new compound
+he has produced; it is full of technical terms and subtle
+distinctions. Probably no other famous poem was turned out in just
+that studied and deliberate architectural way--no pretense of
+inspiration, or of "eyes in fine frenzy rolling": just skilled
+craftsmanship--only this and nothing more.
+
+Arnold's dictum that poetry is a criticism of life is, in a large and
+flexible sense, true. The poet does not criticize life as the
+conscious critic does, but as we unconsciously do in our most exalted
+moments. Arnold, I believe, did not appreciate Whitman, but one
+function of the poet upon which Whitman lays emphasis, is criticism of
+his country and times.
+
+    "What is this you bring, my America?
+    Is it uniform with my country?
+    Is it not something that has been better done or told before?
+    Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
+    Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a pettiness?--is the good old cause
+              in it?
+    Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
+              literates of enemies, lands?
+    Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
+    Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
+    Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
+    Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
+              strength, gait, face?
+    Have real employments contributed to it?
+    Original makers, not mere amanuenses?"
+
+Speaking of criticism, it occurs to me how important it is that a
+poet, or any other writer, should be a critic of himself. Wordsworth,
+who was a really great poet, was great only at rare intervals. His
+habitual mood was dull and prosy. His sin was that he kept on writing
+during those moods, grinding out sonnets by the hundred--one hundred
+and thirty-two ecclesiastical sonnets, and over half as many on
+liberty, all very dull and wooden. His mill kept on grinding whether
+it had any grist of the gods to grind or not. He told Emerson he was
+never in haste to publish, but he seems to have been in haste to
+write, and wrote on all occasions, producing much dull and trivial
+work. We speak of a man's work as being heavy. Let us apply the test
+literally to Wordsworth and weigh his verse. The complete edition of
+his poems, edited by Henry Reed and published in Philadelphia in 1851,
+weighs fifty-five ounces; the selection which Matthew Arnold made from
+his complete works, and which is supposed to contain all that is worth
+preserving, weighs ten ounces. The difference represents the dead
+wood. That Wordsworth was a poor judge of his own work is seen in the
+remark he made to Emerson that he did not regard his "Tintern Abbey"
+as highly as some of the sonnets and parts of "The Excursion." I
+believe the Abbey poem is the one by which he will longest be
+remembered. "The Excursion" is a long, dull sermon. Its didacticism
+lies so heavily upon it that it has nearly crushed its poetry--like a
+stone on a flower.
+
+All poetry is true, but all truth is not poetry. When Burns treats a
+natural-history theme, as in his verses on the mouse and the daisy,
+and even on the louse, how much more there is in them than mere
+natural history! With what a broad and tender philosophy he clothes
+them! how he identifies himself with the mouse and regards himself as
+its fellow mortal! So have Emerson's "Titmouse" and "Humble-Bee" a
+better excuse for being than their natural history. So have McCarthy's
+"For a Bunny" and "The Snake," and "To a Worm."
+
+THE SNAKE
+
+    Poor unpardonable length,
+    All belly to the mouth,
+    Writhe then and wriggle,
+    If there's joy in it!
+
+    _My_ heel, at least, shall spare you.
+
+    A little sun on a stone,
+    A mouse or two,
+    And all that unreasonable belly
+    Is happy.
+
+    No wonder God wasn't satisfied--
+    And went on creating.
+
+TO A WORM
+
+    Do you know you are green, little worm,
+    Like the leaf you feed on?
+    Perhaps it is on account of the birds, who would like to eat you.
+    But is there any reason why they shouldn't eat you, little worm?
+
+    Do you know you are comical, little worm?
+    How you double yourself up and wave your head,
+    And then stretch out and double up again,
+    All after a little food.
+
+    Do you know you have a long, strange name, little worm?
+    I will not tell you what it is.
+    That is for men of learning.
+    You--and God--do not care about such things.
+
+WHAT MAKES A POEM?
+
+    You would wave about and double up just as much, and be just as
+              futile, with it as without it.
+    Why do you crawl about on the top of that post, little worm?
+    It should have been a tree, eh? with green leaves for eating.
+    But it isn't, and you have crawled about it all day, looking for a new
+              brown branch, or a green leaf.
+    Do you know anything about tears, little worm?
+
+Or take McCarthy's lines to the honey bee:
+
+    "Poor desolate betrayer of Pan's trust,
+    Who turned from mating and the sweets thereof,
+    To make of labor an eternal lust,
+    And with pale thrift destroy the red of love,
+    The curse of Pan has sworn your destiny.
+    Unloving, unbeloved, you go your way
+    Toiling forever, and unwittingly
+    You bear love's precious burden every day
+    From flower to flower (for your blasphemy),
+    Poor eunuch, making flower lovers gay."
+
+Or this:
+
+GODLINESS
+
+    I know a man who says
+    That he gets godliness out of a book.
+
+    He told me this as we sought arbutus
+    On the April hills--
+    Little color-poems of God
+    Lilted to us from the ground,
+    Lyric blues and whites and pinks.
+    We climbed great rocks,
+    Eternally chanting their gray elegies,
+    And all about, the cadenced hills
+    Were proud
+    With the stately green epic of the Almighty.
+
+    And then we walked home under the stars,
+    While he kept telling me about his book
+    And the godliness in it.
+
+There are many great lyrics in our literature which have no palpable
+or deducible philosophy; but they are the utterance of deep, serious,
+imaginative natures, and they reach our minds and hearts. Wordsworth's
+"Daffodils," his "Cuckoo," his "Skylark," and scores of others, live
+because they have the freshness and spontaneity of birds and flowers
+themselves.
+
+Such a poem as Gray's "Elegy" holds its own, and will continue to hold
+it, because it puts in pleasing verse form the universal human emotion
+which all persons feel more or less when gazing upon graves.
+
+The intellectual content of Scott's poems is not great but the human and
+emotional content in them is great. A great minstrel of the border
+speaks in them. The best that Emerson could say of Scott was that "he is
+the delight of generous boys," but the spirit of romance offers as
+legitimate a field for the poet as does the spirit of transcendentalism,
+though yielding, of course, different human values.
+
+Every poet of a high order has a deep moral nature, and yet the poet
+is far from being a mere moralist--
+
+    "A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
+    An intellectual all-in-all."
+
+Every true poem is an offering upon the altar of art; it exists to no
+other end; it teaches as nature teaches; it is good as nature is
+good; its art is the art of nature; it brings our spirits in closer
+and more loving contact with the universe; it is for the edification
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SHORT STUDIES IN CONTRASTS
+
+THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT
+
+
+The clouds are transient, but the sky is permanent. The petals of a
+flowering plant are transient, the leaves and fruit are less so, and
+the roots the least transient of all. The dew on the grass is
+transient, as is the frost of an autumn morning. The snows and the
+rains abide longer. The splendors of summer and sunrise and sunset
+soon pass, but the glory of the day lasts. The rainbow vanishes in a
+few moments, but the prismatic effect of the drops of rain is a law of
+optics. Colors fade while texture is unimpaired.
+
+Of course change marks everything, living or dead. Even the pole star
+in astronomic time will vanish. But consider things mundane only. How
+the rocks on the seacoast seem to defy and withstand the waves that
+beat against them! "Weak as is a breaking wave" is a line of
+Wordsworth's. Yet the waves remain after the rocks are gone. The sea
+knows no change as the land does. It and the sky are the two
+unchanging earth features.
+
+In our own lives how transient are our moments of inspiration, our
+morning joy, our ecstasies of the spirit! Upon how much in the world
+of art, literature, invention, modes, may be written the word
+"perishable"! "All flesh is grass," says the old Book. Individuals,
+species, races, pass. Life alone remains and is immortal.
+
+POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE
+
+Positive and negative go hand in hand through the world. Victory and
+defeat, hope and despair, pleasure and pain. Man is positive, woman is
+negative in comparison. The day is positive, the night is negative.
+But it is a pleasure to remember that it is always day in the
+universe.
+
+The shadow of the earth does not extend very far, nor the shadow of
+any other planet. Day is the great cosmic fact. The masses of men are
+negative to the few master and compelling minds. Cold is negative,
+heat is positive, though the difference is only one of degree. The
+negative side of life, the side of meditation, reflection, and
+reverie, is no less important than the side of action and performance.
+Youth is positive, age is negative. Age says No where it used to say
+Yes. It takes in sail. Life's hurry and heat are over, the judgment is
+calm, the passions subdued, the stress of effort relaxed. Our temper
+is less aggressive, events seem less imminent.
+
+The morning is positive; in the evening we muse and dream and take our
+ease, we see our friends, we unstring the bow, we indulge our social
+instincts.
+
+Optimism is positive, pessimism is negative. Fear, suspicion,
+distrust--are all negative.
+
+On the seashore where I write[4] I see the ebbing tide, the exposed
+sand and rocks, the receding waves; and I know the sea is showing us
+its negative side; there is a lull in the battle. But wait a little
+and the mad assault of the waves upon the land will be renewed.
+
+[Footnote 4: La Jolla, California.]
+
+PALM AND FIST
+
+The palm is for friendship, hospitality, and good will; the fist is to
+smite the enemies of truth and justice.
+
+How many men are like the clenched fist--pugnacious, disputatious,
+quarrelsome, always spoiling for a fight; a verbal fisticuff, if not a
+physical one, is their delight. Others are more conciliatory and
+peace-loving, not forgetting that a soft answer turneth away wrath.
+Roosevelt was the man of the clenched fist; not one to stir up strife,
+but a merciless hitter in what he believed a just cause. He always had
+the fighting edge, yet could be as tender and sympathetic as any one.
+This latter side of him is clearly shown in his recently published
+"Letters to His Children." Lincoln was, in contrast, the man with the
+open palm, tempering justice with kindness, and punishment with
+leniency. His War Secretary, Stanton, wielded the hard fist.
+
+PRAISE AND FLATTERY
+
+"More men know how to flatter," said Wendell Phillips, "than how to
+praise." To flatter is easy, to condemn is easy, but to praise
+judiciously and discriminatingly is not easy. Extravagant praise
+defeats itself, as does extravagant blame. A man is rarely overpraised
+during his own time by his own people. If he is an original, forceful
+character, he is much more likely to be overblamed than overpraised.
+He disturbs old ways and institutions. We require an exalted point of
+view to take in a great character, as we do to take in a great
+mountain.
+
+We are likely to overpraise and overblame our presidents. Lincoln was
+greatly overblamed in his day, but we have made it up to his memory.
+President Wilson won the applause of both political parties during his
+first term, but how overwhelmingly did the tide turn against him
+before the end of his second term! All his high and heroic service
+(almost his martyrdom) in the cause of peace, and for the league to
+prevent war, were forgotten in a mad rush of the populace to the other
+extreme. But Wilson will assuredly come to his own in time, and take
+his place among the great presidents.
+
+A little of the Scottish moderation is not so bad; it is always safe.
+A wise man will always prefer unjust blame to fulsome praise. Extremes
+in the estimation of a sound character are bound sooner or later to
+correct themselves. Wendell Phillips himself got more than his share
+of blame during the antislavery days, but the praise came in due time.
+
+GENIUS AND TALENT
+
+The difference between the two is seen in nothing more clearly than in
+the fact that so many educated persons can and do write fairly good
+verse, in fact, write most of the popular newspaper and magazine
+poetry, while only those who have a genius for poetry write real
+poems. Could mere talent have written Bryant's lines "To a Waterfowl"?
+or his "Thanatopsis"? or "June"? Or the small volume of selections of
+great poetry which Arnold made from the massive works of Wordsworth?
+
+Talent could have produced a vast deal of Wordsworth's work--all the
+"Ecclesiastical Sonnets" and much of "The Excursion." Could talent
+have written Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"? It could have produced
+all that Whitman wrote before that time--all his stories and poems.
+Give talent inspiration and it becomes genius. The grub is
+metamorphosed into the butterfly.
+
+"To do what is impossible to Talent is the mark of Genius," says
+Amiel.
+
+Talent may judge, Genius creates. Talent keeps the rules, Genius knows
+when to break them.
+
+"You may know Genius," says the ironical Swift, "by this sign: All the
+dunces are against him."
+
+There is fine talent in Everett's oration at Gettysburg, but what a
+different quality spoke in Lincoln's brief but immortal utterance on
+the same occasion! Is anything more than bright, alert talent shown in
+the mass of Lowell's work, save perhaps in his "Biglow Papers"? If he
+had a genius for poetry, though he wrote much, I cannot see it. His
+tone, as Emerson said, is always that of prose. The "Cathedral" is a
+_tour de force_. The line of his so often quoted--"What is so rare as
+a day in June?"--is a line of prose.
+
+The lines "To a Honey Bee" by John Russell McCarthy are the true gold
+of poetry. "To make of labor an eternal lust" could never have been
+struck off by mere talent.
+
+INVENTION AND DISCOVERY
+
+Columbus discovered America; Edison invented the phonograph, the
+incandescent light, and many other things. If Columbus had not
+discovered America, some other voyager would have. If Harvey had not
+discovered the circulation of the blood, some one else would have. The
+wonder is that it was not discovered ages before. So far as I know, no
+one has yet discovered the function of the spleen, but doubtless in
+time some one will. It is only comparatively recently that the
+functions of other ductless glands have been discovered. What did we
+know about the thyroid gland a half-century ago? All the new
+discoveries in the heavens waited upon the new astronomic methods, and
+the end is not yet. Many things in nature are still like an unexplored
+land. New remedies for the ills of the human body doubtless remain to
+be found. In the mechanical world probably no new principle remains to
+be discovered. "Keely" frauds have had their day. In the chemical
+world, the list of primary elements will probably not be added to,
+though new combinations of these elements may be almost endless. In
+the biological world, new species of insects, birds, and mammals
+doubtless remain to be discovered. Our knowledge of the natural
+history of the globe is far from being complete.
+
+But in regard to inventions the case is different. I find myself
+speculating on such a question as this: If Edison had never been born,
+should we ever have had the phonograph, or the incandescent light? If
+Graham Bell had died in infancy, should we ever have had the
+telephone? Or without Marconi should we have had the wireless, or
+without Morse, the telegraph? Or, to go back still farther, without
+Franklin should we ever have known the identity of lightning and
+electricity? Who taught us how to control electricity and make it do
+our work? One of the questions of Job was, "Canst thou send
+lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" Yes, we
+can. "We are ready to do your bidding," they seem to say, "to run your
+errands, to carry your burdens, to grind your grist, to light your
+houses, to destroy your enemies."
+
+The new inventions that the future holds for us wait upon the new man.
+The discovery of radium--what a secret that was! But in all
+probability had not Curie and his wife discovered it, some other
+investigator would.
+
+Shall we ever learn how to use the atomic energy that is locked up in
+matter? Or how to use the uniform temperature of the globe? Or the
+secret of the glow-worm and firefly--light without heat?
+
+The laws of the conservation of energy and of the correlation of
+forces were discoveries. The art of aviation was both an invention and
+a discovery. The soaring hawks and eagles we have always been familiar
+with; the Wright brothers invented the machine that could do the
+trick.
+
+"Necessity is the mother of invention." As our wants increase, new
+devices to meet them appear. How the diving-bell answered a real need!
+The motor-car also, and the flying-machine. The sewing-machine is a
+great time-saver; the little hooks in our shoes in place of eyelets
+are great time-savers; pins, and friction matches, and rubber
+overshoes, and scores on scores of other inventions answer to real
+needs. Necessity did not call the phonograph into being, nor the
+incandescent light, but the high explosives, dynamite and T. N. T.
+(trinitrotoluol) met real wants.
+
+The Great War with its submarines stimulated inventors to devise
+weapons to cope with them. Always as man's hand and eyes and ears have
+needed reenforcing or extending, his wit has come to his rescue. In
+fact, his progress has been contingent upon this very fact. His
+necessities and his power of invention react upon one another; the
+more he invents, the more he wants, and the more he wants, the more he
+invents.
+
+TOWN AND COUNTRY
+
+I was saying to myself, why do not all literary men go to the country
+to do their work, where they can have health, peace, and solitude?
+Then it occurred to me that there are many men of many minds, and that
+many need to be in the thick of life; they get more stimulus out of
+people than out of nature. The novelist especially needs to be in
+touch with multitudes of men and women. But the poet and the
+philosopher will usually prosper better in the country. A man like
+myself, who is an observer and of a meditative cast, does better in
+the country. Emerson, though city born and bred, finally settled in
+the country. Whitman, on the other hand, loved "populous pavements."
+But he was at home anywhere under the stars. He had no study, no
+library, no club, other than the street, the beach, the hilltop, and
+the marts of men. Mr. Howells was country-born, but came to the city
+for employment and remained there. Does not one wish that he had gone
+back to his Ohio boyhood home? It was easy for me to go back because I
+came of generations of farmer folk. The love of the red soil was in my
+blood. My native hills looked like the faces of my father and mother.
+I could never permanently separate myself from them. I have always had
+a kind of chronic homesickness. Two or three times a year I must
+revisit the old scenes. I have had a land-surveyor make a map of the
+home farm, and I have sketched in and colored all the different fields
+as I knew them in my youth. I keep the map hung up in my room here in
+California, and when I want to go home, I look at this map. I do not
+see the paper. I see fields and woods and stone walls and paths and
+roads and grazing cattle. In this field I used to help make hay; in
+this one I wore my fingers sore picking up stones for these stone
+walls; in this I planted corn and potatoes with my brothers. In these
+maple woods I helped make sugar in the spring; in these I killed my
+first ruffed grouse. In this field I did my first ploughing, with
+thoughts of an academy in a neighboring town at the end of every
+furrow. In this one I burned the dry and decayed stumps in the April
+days, with my younger brother, and a spark set his cap on fire. In
+this orchard I helped gather the apples in October. In this barn we
+husked the corn in the November nights. In this one Father sheared the
+sheep, and Mother picked the geese. My paternal grandfather cleared
+these fields and planted this orchard. I recall the hired man who
+worked for us during my time, and every dog my father had, and my
+adventures with them, hunting wood-chucks and coons. All these things
+and memories have been valuable assets in my life. But it is well that
+not all men have my strong local attachments. The new countries would
+never get settled. My forefathers would never have left Connecticut
+for the wilderness of the Catskills.
+
+As a rule, however, we are a drifting, cosmopolitan people. We are
+easily transplanted; we do not strike our roots down into the geology
+of long-gone time.
+
+I often wonder how so many people of the Old World can pull
+themselves up and migrate to America and never return. The Scots,
+certainly a home-loving race, do it, and do not seem to suffer from
+homesickness.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+DAY BY DAY
+
+
+We often hear it said of a man that he was born too early, or too
+late, but is it ever true? If he is behind his times, would he not
+have been behind at whatever period he had been born? If he is ahead
+of his times, is not the same thing true? In the vegetable world the
+early flowers and fruit blossoms are often cut off by the frost, but
+not so in the world of man. Babies are in order at any time. Is a
+poet, or a philosopher, ever born too late? or too early? If Emerson
+had been born a century earlier, his heterodoxy would have stood in
+his way; but in that case he would not have been a heretic. Whitman
+would have had to wait for a hearing at whatever period he was born.
+He said he was willing to wait for the growth of the taste for
+himself, and it finally came. Emerson's first thin volume called
+"Nature" did not sell the first edition of five hundred copies in ten
+years, but would it have been different at any other time? A piece of
+true literature is not superseded. The fame of man may rise and fall,
+but it lasts. Was Watt too early with his steam-engine, or Morse too
+early with his telegraph? Or Bell too early with his telephone? Or
+Edison with his phonograph or his incandescent light? Or the Wright
+brothers with their flying-machine? Or Henry Ford with his motor-car?
+Before gasolene was discovered they would have been too early, but
+then their inventions would not have materialized.
+
+The world moves, and great men are the springs of progress. But no man
+is born too soon or too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fadeless flower is no flower at all. How Nature ever came to produce
+one is a wonder. Would not paper flowers do as well?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The most memorable days in our lives are the days when we meet a great
+man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How stealthy and silent a thing is that terrible power which we have
+under control in our homes, yet which shakes the heavens in thunder!
+It comes and goes as silently as a spirit. In fact, it is nearer a
+spirit than anything else known to us. We touch a button and here it
+is, like an errand-boy who appears with his cap in his hand and meekly
+asks, "What will you have?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few days ago I was writing of meteoric men. But are we not all like
+meteors that cut across the sky and are quickly swallowed up by the
+darkness--some of us leaving a trail that lasts a little longer than
+others, but all gone in a breath?
+
+Our great pulpit orator Beecher, how little he left that cold print
+does not kill! As a young man I used nearly to run my legs off to get
+to Plymouth Church before the doors were closed. Under his
+trumpet-like voice I was like a reed bent by the wind, but now when in
+a book made up of quotations I see passages from his sermons, they
+seem thin and flimsy. Beecher's oratory was all for the ear and not
+for the eye and mind. In truth, is the world indebted to the pulpit
+for much good literature? Robertson's sermons can be read in the
+library, and there are others of the great English divines. But
+oratory is action and passion. "Great volumes of animal heat," Emerson
+names as one of the qualities of the orator.
+
+The speeches of Wendell Phillips will bear print because his oratory
+was of the quiet, conversational kind. Webster's, of course, stand the
+test of print, but do Clay's or Calhoun's? In our time oratory, as
+such, has about gone out. Rarely now do we hear the eagle scream in
+Congress or on the platform. Men aim to speak earnestly and
+convincingly, but not oratorically. President Wilson is a very
+convincing speaker, but he indulges in no oratory. The one who makes a
+great effort to be eloquent always fails. Noise and fury and
+over-emphasis are not eloquent. "True eloquence," says Pascal,
+"scorns eloquence."
+
+There is no moral law in nature, but there is that out of which the
+moral law arose. There is no answer to prayer in the heavens above, or
+in the earth beneath, except in so far as the attitude of sincere
+prayer is a prophecy of the good it pleads for. Prayer for peace of
+mind, for charity, for gratitude, for light, for courage, is answered
+in the sincere asking. Prayer for material good is often prayer
+against wind and tide, but wind and tide obey those who can rule them.
+
+Our ethical standards injected into world-history lead to confusion
+and contradiction. Introduced into the jungle, they would put an end
+to life there; introduced into the sea, they would put an end to life
+there; the rule that it is more blessed to give than to receive would
+put an end to all competitive business. Our ethical standards are
+narrow, artificial, and apply only to civilized communities. Nations
+have rarely observed them till the present day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If the world is any better for my having lived in it, it is because I
+have pointed the way to a sane and happy life on terms within reach of
+all, in my love and joyous acceptance of the works of Nature about me.
+I have not tried, as the phrase is, to lead my readers from Nature up
+to Nature's God, because I cannot separate the one from the other. If
+your heart warms toward the visible creation, and toward your fellow
+men, you have the root of the matter in you. The power we call God
+does not sustain a mechanical or secondary relation to the universe,
+but is vital in it, or one with it. To give this power human
+lineaments and attributes, as our fathers did, only limits and
+belittles it. And to talk of leading from Nature up to Nature's God is
+to miss the God that throbs in every spear of grass and vibrates in
+the wing of every insect that hums. The Infinite is immanent in this
+universe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The faith that truth exists" is the way that William James begins one
+of his sentences. Of course truth exists where the mind of man exists.
+A new man and there is new truth. Truth, in this sense, is a way of
+looking at things that is agreeable, or that gives satisfaction to the
+human mind. Truth is not a definite fixed quantity, like the gold or
+silver of a country. It is no more a fixed quantity than is beauty. It
+is an experience of the human mind. Beauty and truth are what we make
+them. We say the world is full of beauty. What we mean is that the
+world is full of things that give us the pleasure, or awaken in us the
+sentiment which we call by that name.
+
+The broadest truths are born of the broadest minds. Narrow minds are
+so named from their narrow views of things.
+
+Pilate's question, "What is Truth?" sets the whole world by the ears.
+The question of right and wrong is another thing. Such questions refer
+to action and the conduct of our lives. In religion, in politics, in
+economics, in sociology, what is truth to one man may be error to
+another. We may adopt a course of action because it seems the more
+expedient. Debatable questions have two sides to them. In the moral
+realm that is true which is agreeable to the largest number of
+competent judges. A mind that could see further and deeper might
+reverse all our verdicts. To be right on any question in the moral
+realm is to be in accord with that which makes for the greatest good
+to the greatest number. In our Civil War the South believed itself
+right in seceding from the Union; the North, in fighting to preserve
+the Union. Both sections now see that the North had the larger right.
+The South was sectional, the North national. Each of the great
+political parties thinks it has a monopoly of the truth, but the truth
+usually lies midway between them. Questions of right and wrong do not
+necessarily mean questions of true and false. "There is nothing either
+good or bad," says Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." This may be
+good Christian Science doctrine, but it is doubtful philosophy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yesterday, as I stood on the hill above Slabsides and looked over the
+landscape dotted with farms just greening in the April sun, the
+thought struck me afresh that all this soil, all the fertile fields,
+all these leagues on leagues of sloping valleys and rolling hills came
+from the decay of the rocks, and that the chief agent in bringing
+about this decay and degradation was the gentle rain from heaven--that
+without the rain through the past geologic ages, the scene I looked
+upon would have been only one wild welter of broken or crumpled rocky
+strata, not a green thing, not a living thing, should I have seen.
+
+In the Hawaiian Islands one may have proof of this before his eyes. On
+one end of the island of Maui, the rainfall is very great, and its
+deep valleys and high sharp ridges are clothed with tropical verdure,
+while on the other end, barely ten miles away, rain never falls, and
+the barren, rocky desolation which the scene presents I can never
+forget. No rain, no soil; no soil, no life.
+
+We are, therefore, children of the rocks; the rocks are our mother,
+and the rains our father.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the stream of life, through some favoring condition, breaks
+through its natural checks and bounds, and inundates and destroys
+whole provinces of other forms, as when the locusts, the
+forest-worms, the boll-weevil, the currant-worm, the potato beetle,
+unduly multiply and devastate fields and forests and the farmer's
+crops, what do we witness but Nature's sheer excess and intemperance?
+Life as we usually see it is the result of a complex system of checks
+and counter-checks. The carnivorous animals are a check on the
+herbivorous; the hawks and owls are a check on the birds and fowls;
+the cats and weasels are a check on the small rodents, which are very
+prolific. The different species of plants and trees are a check upon
+one another.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I think the main reason of the abundance of wealth in the country is
+that every man, equipped as he is with so many modern scientific
+appliances and tools, is multiplied four or five times. He is equal to
+that number of men in his capacity to do things as compared with the
+men of fifty or seventy years ago. The farmer, with his
+mowing-machine, his horse-rake, his automobile, his tractor engine and
+gang ploughs or his sulky ploughs, his hay-loader, his corn-planter,
+and so on, does the work of many men. Machinery takes the place of
+men. Gasolene and kerosene oil give man a great advantage. Dynamite,
+too,--what a giant that is in his service! The higher cost of living
+does not offset this advantage.
+
+The condition in Europe at this time is quite different: there the
+energies of men have been directed not to the accumulation of wealth,
+but to the destruction of wealth. Hence, while the war has enriched
+us, it has impoverished Europe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why are women given so much more to ornaments and superfluities in
+dress and finery than men? In the animal kingdom below man, save in a
+few instances, it is the male that wears the showy decorations. The
+male birds have the bright plumes; the male sheep have the big horns;
+the stag has the antlers; the male lion has the heavy mane; the male
+firefly has wings and carries the lamp. With the barnyard fowl the
+male has the long spurs and the showy comb and wattles. In the crow
+tribe, the male cannot be distinguished from the female, nor among the
+fly-catchers, nor among the snipes and plovers. But when we come to
+the human species, and especially among the white races, the female
+fairly runs riot in ornamentation. If it is not to attract the male,
+what is it for? It has been pretty clearly shown that what Darwin
+calls "sexual selection" plays no part. Woman wishes to excite the
+passion of love. She has an instinct for motherhood; the perpetuity of
+the species is at the bottom of it all. Woman knows how to make her
+dress alluring, how to make it provocative, how much to reveal, how
+much to conceal. A certain voluptuousness is the ambition of all
+women; anything but to be skinny and raw-boned. She does not want to
+be muscular and flat-chested, nor, on the other hand, to be
+over-stout, but she prays for the flowing lines and the plumpness that
+belong to youth. A lean man does not repel her, nor a rugged, bony
+frame. Woman's garments are of a different texture and on a different
+scale than those of man, and much more hampering. Her ruffles and
+ribbons and laces all play their part. Her stockings even are a vital
+problem, more important than her religion. We do not care where she
+worships if her dress is attractive. Emerson reports that a lady said
+to him that a sense of being well-dressed at church gave a
+satisfaction which religion could not give.
+
+With man the male defends and safeguards the female. True that among
+savage tribes he makes a slave of her, but in the white races he will
+defend her with his life. She does not take up arms, she does not go
+to sea. She does not work in mines, or as a rule engage in the rough
+work of the world. In Europe she works in the field, and we have had
+farmerettes in this country, but I know of no feminine engineers or
+carpenters or stone masons. There have been a few women explorers and
+Alpine climbers, and investigators in science, but only a few. The
+discovery of radium is chiefly accredited to a woman, and women have a
+few valuable inventions to their credit. I saw a valuable and
+ingenious machine, in a great automobile factory, that was invented by
+a woman. Now that woman has won the franchise in this country, we are
+waiting to see if politics will be purified.
+
+The "weaker sex," surely. How much easier do women cry than men! how
+much more easily are they scared! And yet, how much more pain they can
+endure! And how much more devoted are they to their children!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why does any extended view from a mountain-top over a broad landscape,
+no matter what the features of that landscape, awaken in us the
+emotion of the beautiful? Is it because the eye loves a long range, a
+broad sweep? Or do we have a sense of victory? The book of the
+landscape is now open before us, and we can read it page after page.
+All these weary miles where we tramped, and where the distance, as it
+were, was in ambush, we now command at a glance. Big views expand the
+mind as deep inhalations of air expand the lungs.
+
+Yesterday I stood on the top of Grossmont,[5] probably a thousand feet
+above the landscape, and looked out over a wide expanse of what seemed
+to be parched, barren country; a few artificial lakes or ponds of
+impounded rains, but not a green thing in sight, and yet I was filled
+with pleasurable emotion. I lingered and lingered and gazed and gazed.
+The eye is freed at such times, like a caged bird, and darts far and
+near without hindrance.
+
+[Footnote 5: In San Diego County, California.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "The wings of time are black and white,
+    Pied with morning and with night."
+
+Thus do we objectify that which has no objective existence, but is
+purely a subjective experience. Do we objectify light and sound in the
+same way? No. One can conceive of the vibrations in the ether that
+give us the sensation of light, and in the air that give us sound.
+These vibrations do not depend upon our organs. Time and tide, we say,
+wait for no man. Certainly the tide does not, as it has a real
+objective existence. But time does not wait or hurry. It neither lags
+nor hastens. Yesterday does not exist, nor to-morrow, nor the Now, for
+that matter. Before we can say the moment has come, it is gone. The
+only change there is is in our states of consciousness. How the hours
+lag when we are waiting for a train, and how they hurry when we are
+happily employed! Can we draw a line between the past and the present?
+Can you find a point in the current of the stream that is stationary?
+We speak of being lavish of time and of husbanding time, of improving
+time, and so on. We divide it into seconds and minutes, hours and
+days, weeks, and months, and years. Civilized man is compelled to do
+this; he lives and works by schedule, but it is his states of
+consciousness that he divides and measures. "Time is but a stream I go
+fishing in," says Thoreau. The stream goes by, but the fish stay. The
+river of Time, the tooth of Time--happy comparisons.
+
+"I wasted time and now time wastes me," says Shakespeare. "I have no
+time." "You have all there is," replied the old Indian.
+
+If time, like money, could be hoarded up, we could get all our work
+done. Is there any time outside of man? The animals take no note of
+time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That is a good saying of Juvenal's, "He who owns the soil, owns up to
+the sky." So is this of Virgil's, "Command large fields, but cultivate
+small ones."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Can there be any theory or doctrine not connected with our practical
+lives so absurd that it will not be accepted as true by many people?
+How firmly was a belief in witchcraft held by whole populations for a
+generation! My grandfather believed in it, and in spooks and
+hobgoblins.
+
+The belief in alchemy still prevails--that the baser metals, by the
+aid of the philosopher's stone, can be transmuted into gold and
+silver. Quite recently there was a school in a large town in
+California for teaching alchemy. As it was a failure, its professor
+was involved in litigation with his pupils. I believe the pupils were
+chiefly women.
+
+There is a sect in Florida that believe that we live on the inside of
+a hollow sphere, instead of on the outside of a revolving globe. I
+visited the community with Edison, near Fort Myers, several years ago.
+Some of the women were fine-looking. One old lady looked like Martha
+Washington, but the men all looked "as if they had a screw loose
+somewhere." They believe that the sun and moon and all the starry
+hosts of heaven revolve on the inside of this hollow sphere. All our
+astronomy goes by the board. They look upon it as puerile and
+contemptible. The founder of the sect had said he would rise from the
+dead to confirm its truth. His disciples kept his body till the Board
+of Health obliged them to bury it.
+
+If any one were seriously to urge that we really walk on our heads
+instead of our heels, and cite our baldness as proof, there are
+persons who would believe him. It has been urged that flight to the
+moon in an aeroplane is possible--the want of air is no hindrance! The
+belief in perpetual motion is not yet dead. Many believe that snakes
+charm birds. But it has been found that a stuffed snake-skin will
+"charm" birds also--the bird is hypnotized by its own fear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What has become of the hermits?--men and women who preferred to live
+alone, holding little or no intercourse with their fellows? In my
+youth I knew of several such. There was old Ike Keator, who lived in a
+little unpainted house beside the road near the top of the mountain
+where we passed over into Batavia Kill. He lived there many years. He
+had a rich brother, a farmer in the valley below. Then there was Eri
+Gray, who lived to be over one hundred years. He occupied a little
+house on the side of a mountain, and lived, it was said, like the pigs
+in the pen. Then there was Aunt Deborah Bouton, who lived in a little
+house by a lonely road and took care of her little farm and her four
+or five cows, winter and summer. Since I have lived here on the Hudson
+there was a man who lived alone in an old stone house amid great filth
+on the top of the hill above Esopus village.
+
+In my own line of descent there was a Kelley who lived alone in a hut
+in the woods, not far from Albany. I myself must have a certain amount
+of solitude, but I love to hear the hum of life all about me. I like
+to be secluded in a building warmed by the presence of other persons.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I was a boy on the old farm, the bright, warm, midsummer days
+were canopied with the mellow hum of insects. You did not see them or
+distinguish any one species, but the whole upper air resounded like a
+great harp. It was a very marked feature of midday. But not for fifty
+years have I heard that sound. I have pressed younger and sharper ears
+into my service, but to no purpose: there are certainly fewer
+bumblebees than of old, but not fewer flies or wasps or hornets or
+honey bees. What has wrought the change I do not know.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If the movements going on around us in inert matter could be magnified
+so as to come within range of our unaided vision, how agitated the
+world would seem! The so-called motionless bodies are all vibrating
+and shifting their places day and night at all seasons. The rocks are
+sliding down the hills or creeping out of their beds, the stone walls
+are reeling and toppling, the houses are settling or leaning. All
+inert material raised by the hand of man above the earth's surface is
+slowly being pulled down to a uniform level. The crust of the earth is
+rising or subsiding. The very stars in the constellations are shifting
+their places.
+
+If we could see the molecular and chemical changes and transformations
+that are going on around us, another world of instability would be
+revealed to us. Here we should see real miracles. We should see the
+odorless gases unite to form water. We should see the building of
+crystals, catalysis, and the movements of unstable compounds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Think of what Nature does with varying degrees of temperature--solids,
+fluids, gases. From the bottom to the top of the universe means simply
+more or less heat. It seems like a misuse of words to say that iron
+freezes at a high temperature, that a bar of red-hot or white-hot iron
+is frozen. Water freezes at a high temperature, the air freezes at a
+vastly lower. Carbon dioxide becomes a solid at a very low
+temperature. Hydrogen becomes a liquid at 252 deg. below zero centigrade,
+and a solid at 264 deg.. The gas fluorine becomes a liquid at 210 deg. below
+zero centigrade.
+
+In a world of absolute zero everything would be as solid as the rocks,
+all life, all chemical reactions would cease. All forms of water are
+the result of more or less heat. The circuit of the waters from the
+earth to the clouds and back again, which keeps all the machinery of
+life a-going, is the work of varying degrees of temperature. The Gulf
+Stream, which plays such a part in the climate of Europe, is the
+result of the heat in the Gulf of Mexico. The glacial periods which
+have so modified the surface of the earth in the past were the result
+of temperature changes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How habitually we speak of beauty as a positive thing, just as we do
+of truth! whereas what we call beauty is only an emotional experience
+of our own minds, just as light and heat are sensations of our bodies.
+There is no light where there is no eye, and no sound where there is
+no ear. One is a vibration in the ether, and the other a vibration in
+the air. The vibrations are positive. We do not all see beauty in the
+same things. One man is unmoved where another is thrilled. We say the
+world is full of beauty, when we mean that it is full of objects that
+excite this emotion in our minds.
+
+We speak of truth as if it, too, were a positive thing, and as if
+there were a fixed quantity of it in the world, as there is of gold or
+silver, or diamonds. Truth, again, is an intellectual emotion of the
+human mind. One man's truth is another man's falsehood--moral and
+aesthetic truth, I mean. Objective truth (mathematics and science) must
+be the same to all men.
+
+A certain mode of motion in the molecules of matter gives us the
+sensation of heat, but heat is not a thing, an entity in itself, any
+more than cold is. Yet to our senses one seems just as positive as the
+other.
+
+New truth means a new man. There are as many kinds of truth as there
+are human experiences and temperaments.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How adaptive is animal life! It adds a new touch of interest to the
+forbidding cactus to know that the cactus wren builds her nest between
+its leaves. The spines probably serve to protect the bird from her
+enemies. But are they not also a menace to her and to her young? But
+this "procreant cradle" of a bird in the arms of the fanged desert
+growth softens its aspect a little.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tree of forbidden fruit--the Tree of Knowledge--how copiously has
+mankind eaten of it during these latter generations!--and the chaotic
+state of the world to-day is the result. We have been forcing Nature's
+hand on a tremendous scale. We have gained more knowledge and power
+than we can legitimately use. We are drunk with the sense of power. We
+challenge the very gods. The rapid increase of inventions and the
+harnessing of the powers of Nature have set all nations to
+manufacturing vastly more goods than they can use and they all become
+competitors for world markets, and rivalries and jealousies spring up,
+and the seeds of war are planted. The rapid growth of towns and cities
+is one of the results. The sobering and humanizing influence of the
+country and the farm are less and less in evidence; the excitement,
+the excesses, the intoxication of the cities are more and more. The
+follies and extravagances of wealth lead to the insolence and
+rebellion of the poor. Material power! Drunk with this power, the
+world is running amuck to-day. We have got rid of kings and despots
+and autocratic governments; now if we could only keep sober and make
+democracy safe and enjoyable! Too much science has brought us to
+grief. Behold what Chemistry has done to put imperial power in our
+hands during the last decade!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The grand movements of history and of mankind are like the movements
+of nature, under the same law, elemental, regardless of waste and ruin
+and delays--not the result of human will or design, but of forces we
+wot not of. They are of the same order as floods, tornadoes,
+earthquakes, a release of human forces that have slumbered. The chaos
+of Europe to-day shows the play of such elemental forces, unorganized,
+at cross-purposes, antagonistic, fighting it out in the attempt to
+find an equilibrium. The pain, the suffering, the waste, the delays,
+do not trouble the gods at all. Since man is a part of nature, why
+should not masses of men be ruled by natural law? The human will
+reaches but a little way.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+GLEANINGS
+
+
+I do not believe that one poet can or does efface another, as Arnold
+suggests. As every gas is a vacuum to every other gas, so every new
+poet is a vacuum to every other poet. Wordsworth told Arnold that for
+many years his poems did not bring him enough to buy his shoestrings.
+The reading public had to acquire a taste for him. Whitman said, "I am
+willing to wait for the growth of the taste of myself." A man who
+likes a poet of real worth is going to continue to like him, no matter
+what new man appears. He may not read him over and over, but he goes
+back to him when the mood is upon him. We listen to the same music
+over and over. We take the same walk over and over. We read
+Shakespeare over and over, and we go back to the best in Wordsworth
+over and over. We get in Tennyson what we do not get in Wordsworth,
+and we as truly get in Wordsworth what we do not get in Tennyson.
+Tennyson was sumptuous and aristocratic. Byron found his audience, but
+he did not rob Wordsworth.
+
+It seems to me that the preeminence of Wordsworth lies in the fact
+that he deals so entirely with concrete things--men and objects in
+nature--and floods or saturates them with moral meanings. There is no
+straining, no hair-splitting, no contortions of the oracle, but it all
+comes as naturally as the sunrise or the sunset.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Things not beautiful in themselves, or when seen near at hand, may and
+do give us the sense of beauty when seen at a distance, or in mass.
+Who has not stood on a mountain-top, and seen before him a wild,
+disorderly landscape that has nevertheless awakened in him the emotion
+of the beautiful? or that has given him the emotion of the sublime?
+Wordsworth's "Daffodils," "Three Years She Grew," "The Solitary
+Reaper," "The Rainbow," "The Butterfly," and many others are merely
+beautiful. These lines from Whitman give one the emotion of the
+sublime:
+
+    "I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
+    And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of
+              the farther systems.
+
+    "Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
+    Outward and outward and forever outward.
+
+    "My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
+    He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
+    And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them."
+
+All men may slake their thirst at the same spring of water, but all
+men cannot be thrilled or soothed by beholding the same objects of
+nature. A beautiful child captivates every one, a beautiful woman
+ravishes all eyes. On my way to the Imperial Valley, I recently drove
+across a range of California mountains that had many striking
+features. A lady asked me if I did not think them beautiful. I said,
+"No, they are hideous, but the hideous may be interesting."
+
+The snow is beautiful to many persons, but it is not so to me. It is
+the color of death. I could stand our northern winters very well if I
+could always see the face of the brown or ruddy earth. The snow, I
+know, blankets the fields; and Emerson's poem on the snowstorm is
+fine; at the same time, I would rather not be obliged to look at the
+white fields.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We are the first great people without a past in the European sense. We
+are of yesterday. We do not strike our roots down deep into the
+geology of long-gone ages. We are easily transplanted. We are a
+mixture of all peoples as the other nations of the world are not. Only
+yesterday we were foreigners ourselves. Then we made the first
+experiment on a large scale of a democratic or self-governing people.
+The masses, and not a privileged few, give the tone and complexion to
+things in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly
+national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the
+highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a
+new type of man appearing in this field.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What think ye of Whitman?" This is the question I feel like putting,
+and sometimes do put, to each young poet I meet. If he thinks poorly
+of Whitman, I think poorly of him. I do not expect great things of
+him, and so far my test holds good. William Winter thought poorly of
+Whitman, Aldrich thought poorly of him, and what lasting thing has
+either of them done in poetry? The memorable things of Aldrich are in
+prose. Stedman showed more appreciation of him, and Stedman wrote two
+or three things that will keep. His "Osawatomie Brown ... he shoved
+his ramrod down" is sure of immortality. Higginson could not stand
+Whitman, and had his little fling at him whenever he got the chance.
+Who reads Higginson now? Emerson, who far outranks any other New
+England poet, was fairly swept off his feet by the first appearance of
+"Leaves of Grass." Whittier, I am told, threw the book in the fire.
+Whittier's fame has not gone far beyond New England. The scholarly and
+academic Lowell could not tolerate Whitman, and if Lowell has ever
+written any true poetry, I have not seen it. What Longfellow thought
+of him, I do not know. Thoreau saw his greatness at a glance and went
+to see him. In England, I am told, Tennyson used to read him aloud in
+select company. I know that the two poets corresponded. We catch a
+glimpse of Swinburne's spasmodic insight in his first burst of
+enthusiasm over him, and then of his weakness in recanting.
+Swinburne's friend and house-mate, Watts Dunton, never could endure
+him, but what has he done? So it has gone and still is going, though
+now the acceptance of Whitman has become the fashion.
+
+I have always patted myself on the back for seeing the greatness of
+Whitman from the first day that I read a line of his. I was bewildered
+and disturbed by some things, but I saw enough to satisfy me of his
+greatness.
+
+Whitman had the same faith in himself that Kepler had in his work.
+Whitman said:
+
+    "Whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand, or ten million
+              years,
+    I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait."
+
+Kepler said: "The die is cast; the book is written, to be read either
+now or by posterity. I care not which. It may well wait a century for
+a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an observer like
+myself."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Judging from fragments of his letters that I have seen, Henry James
+was unquestionably hypersensitive. In his dislike of publicity he was
+extreme to the point of abnormality; it made him ill to see his name
+in print, except under just the right conditions. He wanted all things
+veiled and softened. He fled his country, abjured it completely. The
+publicity of it, of everything in America--its climate, its day, its
+night, the garish sun, its fierce, blazing light, the manner of its
+people, its politics, its customs--fairly made him cringe. During his
+last visit here he tried lecturing, but soon gave it up. He fled to
+veiled and ripened and cushioned England--not to the country, but to
+smoky London; and there his hypersensitive soul found peace and ease.
+He became a British subject, washed himself completely of every
+vestige of Americanism. This predilection of his probably accounts for
+the obscurity or tantalizing indirectness of his writings. The last
+story I read of his was called "One More Turn of the Screw," but what
+the screw was, or what the turn was, or whether anybody got pinched or
+squeezed, or what it was all about, I have not the slightest idea. He
+wrote about his visit here, his trip to Boston, to Albany, to New
+York, but which town he was writing about you could not infer from the
+context. He had the gift of a rich, choice vocabulary, but he wove it
+into impenetrable, though silken, veils that concealed more than they
+revealed. When replying to his correspondents on the typewriter, he
+would even apologize for "the fierce legibility of the type."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The contrast between the "singing-robes and the overalls of
+Journalism" is true and striking. Good and true writing no magazine or
+newspaper editor will blue-pencil. But "fine" writing is a different
+thing--a style that is conscious of itself, a style in which the
+thought is commonplace and the language studied and ornate, every
+judicious editor will blue-pencil. Downrightness and sententiousness
+are prime qualities; brevity, concreteness, spontaneity--in fact, all
+forms of genuine expression--help make literature. You know the
+genuine from the spurious, gold from pinchbeck, that's the rub. The
+secret of sound writing is not in the language, but in the mind or
+personality behind the language. The dull writer and the inspired
+writer use, or may use, the same words, and the product will be gold
+in the one and lead in the other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dana's book ["Two Years Before the Mast"] is a classic because it took
+no thought of being a classic. It is a plain, unvarnished tale, not
+loaded up with tedious descriptions. It is all action, a perpetual
+drama in which the sea, the winds, the seamen, the sails--mainsail,
+main royal, foresail--play the principal parts.
+
+There is no book depicting life on the sea to compare with it. Lately
+I have again tried to find the secret of its charm. In the first
+place, it is a plain, unvarnished tale, no attempt at fine writing in
+it. All is action from cover to cover. It is full of thrilling,
+dramatic scenes. In fact, it is almost a perpetual drama in which the
+sea, the winds, the storms, the sails, and the sailors play their
+parts. Each sail, from the smallest to the greatest, has its own
+character and its own part to play; sometimes many of them, sometimes
+few are upon the stage at once. Occasionally all the canvas was piled
+on at once, and then what a sight the ship was to behold! Scudding
+under bare poles was dramatic also.
+
+The life on board ship in those times--its humor, its tedium, its
+dangers, its hardships--was never before so vividly portrayed. The
+tyranny and cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of that
+little world of the ship's deck, stand out in strong relief. Dana had
+a memory like a phonographic record. Unless he took copious notes on
+this journey, it is incredible how he could have made it so complete,
+so specific is the life of each day. The reader craves more light on
+one point--the size of the ship, her length and tonnage. In setting
+out on the homeward journey they took aboard a dozen sheep, four
+bullocks, a dozen or more pigs, three or four dozen of poultry,
+thousands of dressed and cured hides, as well as fodder and feed for
+the cattle and poultry and pigs. The vessel seemed elastic; they could
+always find room for a few thousand more hides, if the need arose. The
+hides were folded up like the leaves of a book, and they invented
+curious machinery to press in a hundred hides where one could not be
+forced by hand. By this means the forty thousand hides were easily
+disposed of as part of the home cargo.
+
+The ship becomes a living being to the sailors. The Alert was so
+loaded, her cargo so _steved_ in, that she was stiff as a man in a
+strait-jacket. But the old sailors said: "Stand by. You'll see her
+work herself loose in a week or two, and then she'll walk up to Cape
+Horn like a race-horse."
+
+It is curious how the sailors can't work together without a song. "A
+song is as necessary to a sailor as the drum and fife are to the
+soldier. They can't pull in time, or pull with a will, without it."
+Some songs were much more effective than others. "Two or three songs
+would be tried, one after the other, with no effect--not an inch could
+be got upon the tackles, when a new song struck up seemed to hit the
+humor of the moment and drove the tackles two blocks at once. 'Heave
+round, hearty!' 'Captain gone ashore!' and the like, might do for
+common pulls, but in an emergency, when we wanted a heavy,
+raise-the-dead pull, which would start the beams of the ship, there
+was nothing like 'Time for us to go!' 'Round the corner,' or 'Hurrah!
+Hurrah! my hearty bullies!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mind of the professional critic, like the professional logical
+mind, becomes possessed of certain rules which it adheres to on all
+occasions. There is a well-known legal mind in this country which is
+typical. A recent political opponent of the man says:
+
+     His is the type of mind which would have sided with King
+     John against granting the Magna Charta; the type of mind
+     which would have opposed the ratification of the
+     Constitution of the United States because he would have
+     found so many holes in it. His is the type of mind which
+     would have opposed the Monroe Doctrine on the ground that it
+     was dangerous. His is the type of mind which would have
+     opposed the Emancipation Proclamation on the ground of
+     taking away property without due process of law. His is the
+     type of mind which would have opposed Cleveland's Venezuela
+     message to England on the ground that it was unprecedented.
+     His is the type of mind which did its best in 1912 to oppose
+     Theodore Roosevelt's effort to make the Republican Party
+     progressive.
+
+Such a mind would have no use for Roosevelt, for instance, because
+Roosevelt was not bound by precedents, but made precedents of his own.
+The typical critical mind, such as Arnold's, would deny the title of
+philosopher to a man who has no constructive talent, who could not
+build up his own philosophy into a system. He would deny another the
+title of poet because his verse has not the Miltonic qualities of
+simplicity, of sensuousness, of passion. Emerson was not a great man
+of letters, Arnold said, because he had not the genius and instinct
+for style; his prose had not the requisite wholeness of good tissue.
+Emerson's prose is certainly not Arnold's prose, but at its best it is
+just as effective.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a good idea of Santayana that "the function of poetry is to
+emotionalize philosophy."
+
+How absurd, even repulsive, is the argument of "Paradise Lost"! yet
+here is great poetry, not in the matter, but in the manner.
+
+    "Though fallen on evil days, on evil days though fallen."
+    "To shun delights and live laborious days."
+
+Common ideas, but what dignity in the expression!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Criticism is easy. When a writer has nothing else to do, he can
+criticize some other writer. But to create and originate is not so
+easy. One may say that appreciation is easy also. How many persons
+appreciate good literature who cannot produce it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The rash and the audacious are not the same. Audacity means boldness,
+but to be rash often means to be imprudent or foolhardy. When a little
+dog attacks a big dog, as so often happens, his boldness becomes
+rashness. When Charles Kingsley attacked Newman, his boldness turned
+out to be rashness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Little wonder that in his essay on "Books" Emerson recommends Thomas a
+Kempis's "Imitation of Christ." Substitute the word Nature for God and
+Christ and much of it will sound very Emersonian. Emerson was a kind
+of New England Thomas a Kempis. His spirit and attitude of mind were
+essentially the same, only directed to Nature and the modern world.
+Humble yourself, keep yourself in the background, and let the
+over-soul speak. "I desire no consolation which taketh from me
+compunction." "I love no contemplation which leads to pride." "For all
+that which is high is not holy, nor everything that is sweet, good."
+"I had rather feel contrition, than be skilled in the definition of
+it." "All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was
+written." How Emersonian all this sounds!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a fat volume of forty thousand quotations from the literature of
+all times and countries, compiled by some patient and industrious
+person, at least half of it is not worth the paper on which it is
+printed. There seem to be more quotations in it from Shakespeare than
+from any other poet, which is as it should be. There seem to be more
+from Emerson than from any other American poet, which again is as it
+should be. Those from the great names of antiquity--the Bible, Sadi,
+Cicero, AEschylus, Euripides, Aristotle, and others--are all worth
+while, and the quotations from Bacon, Newton, Addison, Locke, Chaucer,
+Johnson, Carlyle, Huxley, Tennyson, Goethe are welcome. But the
+quotations from women writers and poets,--Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Sigourney,
+Jean Ingelow, and others,--what are they worth? Who would expect
+anything profound from J. G. Holland or Chapin, O. W. Holmes, or
+Alger, or Alcott, or Helps, or Dickens, or Lewes, or Froude, or
+Lowell? I certainly should not.
+
+Such a selection is good to leaf over. Your thought may be kindled or
+fanned here and there. The subjects are arranged alphabetically, and
+embrace nearly all themes of human interest from ability to zephyrs.
+There is very little from Whitman, and, I think, only one quotation
+from Thoreau.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The death of Howells gave me a shock. I had known him long, though not
+intimately. He was my senior by only one month. It had been two years
+or more since I had seen him. Last December I read his charming paper on
+"Eighty Years and After" and enjoyed it greatly. It is a masterpiece. No
+other American man of letters, past or present, could have done that. In
+fact, there has been no other American who achieved the all-round
+literary craftsmanship that Mr. Howells achieved. His equal in his own
+line we have never seen. His felicity on all occasions was a wonder. His
+works do not belong to the literature of power, but to the literature of
+charm, grace, felicity. His style is as flexible and as limpid as a
+mountain rill. Only among the French do we find such qualities in such
+perfection. Some of his writings--"Their Wedding Journey," for
+instance--are too photographic. We miss the lure of the imagination,
+such as Hawthorne gave to all his pictures of real things. Only one of
+Howells's volumes have I found too thin for me to finish--his "London
+Films" was too filmy for me. I had read Taine's "London Notes" and felt
+the force of a different type of mind. But Howells's "Eighty Years and
+After" will live as a classic. Oh, the felicity of his style! One of his
+later poems on growing old ("On a Bright Winter's Day" it is called) is
+a gem.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SUNDOWN PAPERS
+
+RE-READING BERGSON
+
+
+I am trying again to read Bergson's "Creative Evolution," with poor
+success. When I recall how I was taken with the work ten or more years
+ago, and carried it with me whenever I went from home, I am wondering
+if my mind has become too old and feeble to take it in. But I do not
+have such difficulty with any other of my favorite authors. Bergson's
+work now seems to me a mixture of two things that won't
+mix--metaphysics and natural science. It is full of word-splitting and
+conjuring with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. The style
+is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. He enlarges upon the
+inability of the intellect to understand or grasp Life. The reason is
+baffled, but sympathy and the emotional nature and the intuitions
+grasp the mystery.
+
+This may be true, the heart often knows what the head does not; but is
+it not the intellect that tells us so? The intellect understands the
+grounds of our inability. We can and do reason about the limitations
+of reason. We do not know how matter and spirit blend, but we know
+they do blend. The animals live by instinct, and we live largely in
+our emotions, but it is reason that has placed man at the head of the
+animal kingdom.
+
+Bergson himself by no means dispenses with the logical faculty. Note
+his close and convincing reasoning on the development of the
+vertebrate eye, and how inadequate the Darwinian idea of the
+accumulation of insensible variations is to account for it. A closer
+and more convincing piece of reasoning would be hard to find.
+
+Bergson's conception of two currents--an upward current of spirit and
+a downward current of matter--meeting and uniting at a definite time
+and place and producing life, is extremely fanciful. Where had they
+both been during all the geologic ages? I do not suppose they had been
+any _where_. How life arose is, of course, one of the great mysteries.
+But do we not know enough to see that it did not originate in this
+sudden spectacular way?--that it began very slowly, in unicellular
+germs?
+
+At first I was so captivated by the wonderful style of M. Bergson, and
+the richness of his page in natural history, that I could see no flaws
+in his subject-matter, but now that my enthusiasm has cooled off a
+little I return to him and am looking closer into the text.
+
+Is not Bergson guilty of false or careless reasoning when he says
+that the relation of the soul to the brain is like that of a coat to
+the nail upon which it hangs? I call this spurious or pinchbeck
+analogy. If we know anything about it, do we not know that the
+relation of the two is not a mechanical or fortuitous one? and that it
+cannot be defined in this loose way?
+
+"To a large extent," Bergson says, "thought is independent of the
+brain." "The brain is, strictly speaking, neither an organ of thought,
+nor of feeling, nor of consciousness." He speaks of consciousness as
+if it were a disembodied something floating around in the air
+overhead, like wireless messages. If I do not think with my brain,
+with what do I think? Certainly not with my legs, or my abdomen, or my
+chest. I think with my head, or the gray matter of my brain. I look
+down at the rest of my body and I say, this is part of me, but it is
+not the real me. With both legs and both arms gone, I should still be
+I. But cut off my head and where am I?
+
+Has not the intelligence of the animal kingdom increased during the
+geologic ages with the increase in the size of the brain?
+
+REVISIONS
+
+I have little need to revise my opinion of any of the great names of
+English literature. I probably make more strenuous demands upon him
+who aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than
+ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make
+poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes
+honey. Many of our would-be young poets bring us the crude nectar from
+the fields--fine descriptions of flowers, birds, sunsets, and so
+on--and expect us to accept them as honey. The quality of the man
+makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe
+birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn
+greatly.
+
+Dean Swift quotes Sir Philip Sidney as saying that the "chief life of
+modern versifying consists in rhyme." Swift agrees with him. "Verse
+without rhyme," he says, "is a body without a soul, or a bell without
+a clapper." He thinks Milton's "Paradise Lost" would be greatly
+improved if it had rhyme. This, he says, would make it "more heroic
+and sonorous than it is."
+
+Unobtrusive rhyme may be a help in certain cases, but what modern
+reader would say that a poem without rhyme is a body without a soul?
+This would exclude many of the noblest productions of English
+literature.
+
+BERGSON AND TELEPATHY
+
+Bergson seems always to have been more than half-convinced of the
+truth of spiritualism. When we are already half-convinced of a thing,
+it takes but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself into a
+belief in telepathy in this wise: "We produce electricity at every
+moment; the atmosphere is continually electrified; we move among
+magnetic currents. Yet for thousands of years millions of human beings
+have lived who never suspected the existence of electricity."
+
+Millions of persons have also lived without suspecting the pull of the
+sun and moon upon us; or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our
+bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or that the coast of this
+part of the continent is slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the
+earth's crust); or without suspecting the incredible speed of the
+stars in the midnight sky; or that the earth is turning under our
+feet; or that electrons are shooting off from the candle or lamp by
+the light of which we are reading. There are assuredly more things in
+heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, many of which
+we shall doubtless yet find out, and many more of which we shall never
+find out. Wireless messages may be continually going through our
+houses and our bodies, and through the air we breathe, and we never
+suspect them. Shall we, then, infer that the air around us is full of
+spirits of our departed friends? I hope it is, but I fail to see any
+warrant for the belief in this kind of reasoning. It does not lend
+color even to the probability, any more than it does to the
+probability that we shall yet be able to read one another's thoughts
+and become expert mind-readers. Mind-reading seems to be a reality
+with a few persons, with one in many millions. But I cannot therefore
+believe in spiritualism as I believe in the "defeat of the Invincible
+Armada." Fleets have been defeated in all ages. Facts are amenable to
+observation and experiment, but merely alleged facts do not stand the
+laboratory tests.
+
+If memory is not a function of the brain, of what is it a function? If
+"judgment, reasoning, or any other act of thought" are not functions
+of the brain, of what are they the functions? The scientific method is
+adequate to deal with all questions capable of proof or disproof. If
+we apply the scientific or experimental method to miracles, where does
+it leave them? Ask Huxley. Thought-transference is possible, but does
+this prove spiritualism to be true?
+
+I know of a man who can answer your questions if you know the answers
+yourself, even without reading them or hearing you ask them. He once
+read a chemical formula for Edison which nobody but Edison had ever
+seen. I am glad that such things are possible. They confirm our faith
+in the reality of the unseen. They show us in what a world of occult
+laws and influences we live, but they tell us nothing of any other
+world.
+
+METEORIC MEN AND PLANETARY MEN
+
+There are meteoric men and there are planetary men. The men who now
+and then flash across our intellectual heavens, drawing all eyes for
+the moment, these I call meteoric men. What a contrast they present to
+the planetary men, who are slow to attract our attention, but who
+abide, and do not grow dim! Poets like Emerson, Whitman, and
+Wordsworth were slow to gain recognition, but the radiance of their
+names grows. I call such a poet as Swinburne meteoric, a poet of a
+certain kind of brilliant power, but who reads him now? Stephen
+Phillips with his "Marpessa" had a brief vogue, and then disappeared
+in the darkness. When I was a young man, I remember, a Scottish poet,
+Alexander Smith, published a "Life Drama," which dazzled the literary
+world for a brief period, but it is forgotten now. What attention
+Kidd's "Social Evolution" attracted a generation or more ago! But it
+is now quite neglected. It was not sound. When he died a few years ago
+there was barely an allusion to it in the public press. The same fate
+befell that talented man, Buckle, with his "Civilization in England."
+Delia Bacon held the ear of the public for a time with the
+Bacon-Shakespeare theory. Pulpit men like Joseph Cook and Adirondack
+Murray blazed out, and then were gone. Half a century ago or more an
+Englishman by the name of M. F. Tupper published a book called
+"Proverbial Philosophy" which had a brief season of popularity, and
+then went out like a rush-light, or a blaze of tissue paper. Novels
+like Miss Sprague's "Earnest Trifler," Du Maurier's "Trilby," and
+Wallace's "Ben Hur" have had their little day, and been forgotten. In
+the art world the Cubists' crazy work drew the attention of the public
+long enough for it to be seen how spurious and absurd it was.
+Brownell's war poems turned out to be little more than brief
+fireworks. Joaquin Miller, where is he? Fifty years ago Gail Hamilton
+was much in the public eye, and Grace Greenwood, and Fanny Fern; and
+in Bohemian circles, there were Agnes Franz and Ada Clare, but they
+are all quite forgotten now.
+
+The meteoric men would not appreciate President Wilson's wise saying
+that he would rather fail in a cause that in time is bound to succeed
+than to succeed in a cause that in time is bound to fail. Such men
+cannot wait for success. Meteoric men in politics, like Elaine and
+Conkling, were brilliant men, but were politicians merely. What
+fruitful or constructive ideas did they leave us? Could they forget
+party in the good of the whole country? Are not the opponents of the
+League of Nations of our own day in the same case--without, however,
+shining with the same degree of brilliancy? To some of our
+Presidents--Polk, Pierce, Buchanan--we owe little or nothing.
+Roosevelt's career, though meteoric in its sudden brilliancy, will
+shine with a steady light down the ages. He left lasting results. He
+raised permanently the standard of morality in politics and business
+in this country by the gospel of the square deal. Woodrow Wilson,
+after the mists and clouds are all dispelled, will shine serenely on.
+He is one of the few men of the ages.
+
+THE DAILY PAPERS
+
+Probably the worst feature of our civilization is the daily paper. It
+scatters crime, bad manners, and a pernicious levity as a wind
+scatters fire. Crime feeds upon crime, and the newspapers make sure
+that every criminally inclined reader shall have enough to feed upon,
+shall have his vicious nature aroused and stimulated. Is it probable
+that a second and a third President of the United States would ever
+have been assassinated by shooting, had not such notoriety been given
+to the first crime? Murder, arson, theft, peculation, are as
+contagious as smallpox.
+
+Who can help a pitying or a scornful smile when he hears of a school
+of journalism, a school for promoting crime and debauching the manners
+and the conscience of the people?--for teaching the gentle art of
+lying, for manufacturing news when there is no news? The pupils are
+taught, I suppose, how to serve up the sweepings from the streets and
+the gutters and the bar-rooms in the most engaging manner. They are
+taught how to give the great Public what it wants, and the one thing
+the great Public wants, and can never get enough of is any form of
+sensationalism. It clearly loves scandals about the rich, or anything
+about the rich, because we all want and expect to be rich, to
+out-shine our neighbors, to cut a wide swath in society. Give us
+anything about the rich, the Public says; we will take the mud from
+their shoes; if we can't get that, give us the parings of their
+finger-nails.
+
+The inelastic character of the newspaper is a hampering factor--so
+many columns must be filled, news or no news. And when there is a
+great amount of important news, see how much is suppressed that but
+for this inelasticity would have been printed!
+
+The professor at the school of journalism says: "I try to hammer it
+into them day after day that they have got to learn to get the
+news--that, whatever else a reporter can or cannot do, he isn't a
+reporter till he has learned to get the news." Hence the invasion of
+private houses, the bribery, the stealing of letters, the listening at
+key-holes, the craze for photographing the most sacred episodes, the
+betrayals of confidence, that the newspapers are responsible for.
+They must get what the dear Public most likes to hear, if they have to
+scale a man's housetop, and come down his chimney. And if they cannot
+get the true story, they must invent one. The idle curiosity of the
+Public must be satisfied.
+
+Now the real news, the news the Public is entitled to, is always easy
+to get. It grows by the wayside. The Public is entitled to public
+news, not to family secrets; to the life of the street and the mart,
+not to life behind closed doors. In the dearth of real news, the paper
+is filled with the dust and sweepings from the public highways and
+byways, from saloons, police courts, political halls--sordid,
+ephemeral, and worthless, because it would never get into print if
+there were real news to serve up.
+
+Then the advertising. The items of news now peep out at us from
+between flaming advertisements of the shopmen's goods, like men on the
+street hawking their wares, each trying to out-scream the other and
+making such a Bedlam that our ears are stunned.[6]
+
+[Footnote 6: This fragment is hardly representative of the attitude of
+Mr. Burroughs toward our worthy dailies, and, could he have expanded
+the article, it would have had in its entirety a different tone. He
+lived on the breath of the newspapers; was always eager for legitimate
+news; and was especially outspoken in admiration of the superb work
+done by many newspaper correspondents during the World War.
+Furthermore, he was himself always most approachable and friendly to
+the reporters, complaining, however, that they often failed to quote
+him when he took real pains to help them get things straight; while
+they often insisted on emphasizing sensational aspects, and even put
+words in his mouth which he never uttered. But the truth is, he valued
+the high-class newspapers, though regarding even them as a two-edged
+sword, since their praiseworthy efforts are so vitiated by craze for
+the sensational.--C. B.]
+
+THE ALPHABET
+
+Until we have stopped to think about it, few of us realize what it
+means to have an alphabet--the combination of a few straight lines and
+curves which form our letters. When you have learned these, and how to
+arrange them into words, you have the key that unlocks all the
+libraries in the world. An assortment and arrangement of black lines
+on a white surface! These lines mean nothing in themselves; they are
+not symbols, nor pictures, nor hieroglyphics, yet the mastery of them
+is one of the touchstones of civilization. The progress of the race
+since the dawn of history, or since the art of writing has been
+invented, has gone forward with leaps and bounds. The prehistoric
+races, and the barbarous races of our own times, had and have only
+picture language.
+
+The Chinese have no alphabet. It is said that they are now accepting a
+phonetic alphabet. The Chinese system of writing comprises more than
+forty thousand separate symbols, each a different word. It requires
+the memorizing of at least three thousand word-signs to read and write
+their language. The national phonetic script is made up of sixty
+distinct characters that answer to our twenty-four. These characters
+embrace every verbal sound of the language, and in combination make up
+every word. The progress of China has been greatly hampered by this
+want of an alphabet.
+
+Coleridge says about the primary art of writing: "First, there is mere
+gesticulation, then rosaries, or wampum, then picture language, then
+hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters,"--the last an evolution
+from all that went before. But there is no more suggestion of an
+alphabet in the sign language of the North American Indian than there
+is of man in a crinoid.
+
+THE REDS OF LITERATURE
+
+A class of young men who seem to look upon themselves as revolutionary
+poets has arisen, chiefly in Chicago; and they are putting forth the
+most astonishing stuff in the name of free verse that has probably
+ever appeared anywhere. In a late number of "Current Opinion," Carl
+Sandburg, who, I am told, is their chosen leader, waves his dirty
+shirt in the face of the public in this fashion:
+
+    "My shirt is a token and a symbol more than a cover from sun and rain,
+    My shirt is a signal and a teller of souls,
+    I can take off my shirt and tear it, and so make a ripping razzly
+              noise, and the people will say, 'Look at him tear his shirt!'
+
+    "I can keep my shirt on,
+    I can stick around and sing like a little bird, and look 'em all in the
+              eye and never be fazed,
+    I can keep my shirt on."
+
+Does not this resemble poetry about as much as a pile of dirty rags
+resembles silk or broadcloth? The trick of it seems to be to take
+flat, unimaginative prose and cut it up in lines of varying length,
+and often omit the capitals at the beginning of the lines--"shredded
+prose," with no "kick" in it at all. These men are the "Reds" of
+literature. They would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and
+standards upon which literature is founded. They show what Bolshevism
+carried out in the field of poetry, would lead to. One of them who
+signs himself H. D. writes thus in the "Dial" on "Helios":
+
+    "Helios makes all things right--
+    night brands and chokes,
+    as if destruction broke
+    over furze and stone and crop
+    of myrtle-shoot and field-wort,
+    destroyed with flakes of iron,
+    the bracken-stone,
+    where tender roots were sown
+    blight, chaff, and wash
+    of darkness to choke and drown.
+
+    "A curious god to find,
+    yet in the end faithful;
+    bitter, the Kyprian's feet--
+    ah, flecks of withered clay,
+    great hero, vaunted lord--
+    ah, petals, dust and windfall
+    on the ground--queen awaiting queen."
+
+What it all means--who can tell? It is as empty of intelligent meaning
+as a rubbish-heap. Yet these men claim to get their charter from
+Whitman. I do not think Whitman would be enough interested in them to
+feel contempt toward them. Whitman was a man of tremendous
+personality, and every line he wrote had a meaning, and his whole work
+was suffused with a philosophy as was his body with blood.
+
+These Reds belong to the same class of inane sensationalists that the
+Cubists do; they would defy in verse what the Cubists defy in form.
+
+I have just been skimming through an illustrated book called "Noa
+Noa," by a Frenchman, which describes, or pretends to describe, a
+visit to Tahiti. There is not much fault to be found with it as a
+narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the
+figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they
+had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple,
+honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the
+Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all--a
+refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal
+and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the
+outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and
+the other Ists among the French have turned out. The degenerate
+Frenchman is like our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining,
+and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an odor of dead rats.
+
+I recently chanced upon the picture of a kneeling girl, by one of the
+Reds in art, a charcoal sketch apparently. It suggests the crude
+attempts of a child. The mouth is a black, smutty hole in the face,
+the eyes are not mates, and one of them is merely a black dot. In
+fact, the whole head seems thrust up into a cloud of charcoal dust.
+The partly nude body has not a mark of femininity. The body is very
+long and the legs very short, and the knees, as they protrude from
+under the drapery, look like two irregular blocks of wood.
+
+To falsify or belie nature seems to be the sole aim of these
+creatures. The best thing that could happen to the whole gang of them
+would be to be compelled to go out and dig and spade the earth. They
+would then see what things are really like.
+
+THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION
+
+It is interesting to note that the doctrine of evolution itself has
+undergone as complete an evolution as has any animal species with
+which it deals. We find the germ of it, so to speak, in the early
+Greek philosophers and not much more. Crude, half-developed forms of
+it begin to appear in the eighteenth century of our era and become
+more and more developed in the nineteenth, till they approximate
+completion in Darwin. In Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795 there are
+glimpses of the theory, but in Lamarck, near the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, the theory is so fully developed that it
+anticipates Darwin on many points; often full of crudities and
+absurdities, yet Lamarck hits the mark surprisingly often. In 1813 Dr.
+W. C. Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the Royal Society in
+London that contains a passage that might have come from the pages of
+Darwin. In the anonymous and famous volume called "Vestiges of
+Creation," published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of
+species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution
+theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the
+minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse
+toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again in
+Lamarck, but was repudiated by Darwin.
+
+FOLLOWING ONE'S BENT
+
+I have done what I most wanted to do in the world, what I was probably
+best fitted to do, not as the result of deliberate planning or
+calculation, but by simply going with the current, that is, following
+my natural bent, and refusing to run after false gods. Riches and fame
+and power, when directly pursued, are false gods. If a man
+deliberately says to himself, "I will win these things," he has
+likely reckoned without his host. His host is the nature within and
+without him, and that may have something to say on the subject. But if
+he says, "I will do the worthy work that comes to my hand, the work
+that my character and my talent bring me, and I will do it the best I
+can," he will not reap a barren harvest.
+
+So many persons are disappointed in life! They have had false aims.
+They have wanted something for nothing. They have listened to the call
+of ambition and have not heeded the inner light. They have tried short
+cuts to fame and fortune, and have not been willing to pay the price
+in self-denial that all worthy success demands. We find our position
+in life according to the specific gravity of our moral and
+intellectual natures.
+
+NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OLD AGE[7]
+
+The physiology of old age is well understood--general sluggishness of
+all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called
+rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing
+hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the
+psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons
+well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert,
+the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old
+man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and
+experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their
+relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a
+person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he
+remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may
+go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of
+those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them
+from their graves: There was G----; how distinctly he recalls the name
+and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was
+B----, a name only. There was R----, and the memory of the career he
+had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat
+accident; but of his looks, his voice--not a vestige! It is a memory
+full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls
+his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly--voice, look,
+manner--all complete. Others are only names associated with certain
+incidents in school.
+
+[Footnote 7: These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand
+into an article, were among the very last things he wrote.--C. B.]
+
+Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his
+life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt
+slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then the next moment, away it
+goes again! Or, shall we call it a kind of mental anaesthesia, or
+mental paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about
+Georgetown, South America. I repeated the name over to myself a few
+times. "Have I not known such a place some time in my life? Where is
+it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" The name seemed like a dream. Then I
+thought of Washington, the Capital, and the city above it, but had to
+ask a friend if the name was Georgetown. Then suddenly, as if some
+chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came!
+Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it?
+(I had lived in Washington for ten years.)
+
+So we say, old age may reason well, but old age does not remember
+well. This is a commonplace. It seems as if memory were the most
+uncertain of all our faculties.
+
+Power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in
+the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we
+octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not
+grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only
+need to focus upon you a little more completely.
+
+Of course both sight and hearing are a little blunted in old age. But
+for myself I see as well as ever I did, except that I have to use
+spectacles in reading; but nowadays the younger observers hear the
+finer sounds in nature that sometimes escape me.
+
+Some men mellow with age, others harden, but the man who does not in
+some way ripen is in a bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what it
+lacks in repose.
+
+To grow old gracefully is the trick.
+
+To me one of the worst things about old age is that one has outlived
+all his old friends. The Past becomes a cemetery.
+
+"As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, "they grow more foolish and
+more wise"--wise in counsel, but foolish in conduct. "There is no fool
+like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is equally true that there is
+no fool like the young fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to
+middle age.
+
+As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting to collate many wise
+sayings of many wise men on youth and age.[8]
+
+[Footnote 8: Here followed several pages of quotations from the
+ancients and moderns.--C. B.]
+
+Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is
+certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any.
+They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent,
+the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of
+pleasures is gone and another takes its place.
+
+Emerson published his essay on "Old Age" while he was yet in the
+middle sixties, and I recall that in the "Emerson-Carlyle
+Correspondence" both men began to complain of being old before they
+were sixty. Scott was old before his time, and Macaulay too. Scott
+died at sixty-one, Macaulay at fifty-nine, Tennyson at eighty-three,
+Carlyle at eighty-six, Emerson at seventy-nine, Amiel at sixty.
+
+I have heard it said that it is characteristic of old age to reverse
+its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them;
+it revises them. If its years have been well spent, it has reached a
+higher position from which to overlook life. It commands a wider view,
+and the relation of the parts to the whole is more clearly seen....
+
+"Old age superbly rising"--Whitman.
+
+Age without decrepitude, or remorse, or fear, or hardness of heart!
+
+FACING THE MYSTERY
+
+I wish there were something to light up the grave for me, but there is
+not. It is the primal, unending darkness. The faith of all the saints
+and martyrs does not help me. I must see the light beyond with my own
+eyes. Whitman's indomitable faith I admire, but cannot share. My torch
+will not kindle at his great flame. From our youth up our associations
+with the dead and with the grave are oppressive. Our natural animal
+instincts get the better of us. Death seems the great catastrophe.
+The silver cord is loosened, and the golden bowl is broken. The
+physical aspects of death are unlovely and repellent. And the
+spiritual aspects--only the elect can see them. Our physical senses
+are so dominant, the visible world is so overpowering, that all else
+becomes as dreams and shadows.
+
+I know that I am a part of the great cosmic system of things, and that
+all the material and all the forces that make up my being are as
+indestructible as the great Cosmos itself--all that is physical must
+remain in some form. But consciousness, the real Me, is not physical,
+but an effect of the physical. It is really no more a thing than "a
+child's curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the night," and as the one is
+evanescent, why not the other?
+
+Nature is so opulent, so indifferent to that we hold most precious,
+such a spendthrift, evokes such wonders from such simple materials!
+Why should she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff of
+myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays down. Her cycles of
+change, of life and death, go on forever. She does not lay up stores;
+she is, and has, all stores, whether she keep or whether she waste. It
+is all the same to her. There is no outside, no beyond, to her
+processes and possessions. There is no future for her, only an
+ever-lasting present. What is the very bloom and fragrance of
+humanity to the Infinite? In the yesterday of geologic time, humanity
+was not. In the to-morrow of geologic time, it will not be. The very
+mountains might be made of souls, and all the stars of heaven kindled
+with souls, such is the wealth of Nature in what we deem so precious,
+and so indifferent is she to our standards of valuation.
+
+This I know, too: that the grave is not dark or cold to the dead, but
+only to the living. The light of the eye, the warmth of the body,
+still exist undiminished in the universe, but in other relations,
+under other forms. Shall the flower complain because it fades and
+falls? It has to fall before the fruit can appear. But what is the
+fruit of the flower of human life? Surely not the grave, as the loose
+thinking of some seem to imply. The only fruit I can see is in fairer
+flowers, or a higher type of mind and life that follows in this world,
+and to which our lives may contribute. The flower of life has improved
+through the ages--the geologic ages; from the flower of the brute, it
+has become the flower of the man. You and I perish, but something goes
+out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of
+mankind. To what end? Who knows? We cannot cross-question the
+Infinite. Something in the universe has eventuated in man, and
+something has profited by his ameliorations. We must regard him as a
+legitimate product, and we must look upon death as a legitimate part
+of the great cycle--an evil only from our temporary and personal point
+of view, but a good from the point of view of the whole.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Adaptation, 247, 248.
+
+Agassiz, Louis, 163.
+
+Alchemy, 242, 243.
+
+Alcott, Amos Bronson, in Emerson's Journals, 26-29;
+  on Thoreau, 156.
+
+Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 253.
+
+Alphabet, the, 275, 276.
+
+American people, the, 252, 253.
+
+Amiel, Henri Frederic, 4-6;
+  quoted, 223.
+
+Arnim, Elisabeth von, 34, 35.
+
+Arnold, Matthew, 213, 250, 260;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 25;
+  on Emerson, 87, 89, 90;
+  his poetry, 209;
+  on poetry, 212.
+
+Art, recent "isms" in, 278, 279.
+
+Audacity, 261.
+
+Aurora borealis, 140, 141.
+
+
+Batavia Kill, 244.
+
+Beauty, 98-101, 246, 247, 251, 252.
+
+Beecher, Henry Ward, 232.
+
+Bent, following one's, 280, 281.
+
+Benton, Myron, 26.
+
+Bergson, Henri, his "Creative Evolution," revised estimate of, 264-66;
+  and telepathy, 267, 268.
+
+Bettina, Goethe's, 34, 35.
+
+Bittern, pumping, 135.
+
+Boldness, 261.
+
+Bouton, Deborah, 244.
+
+Bryant, William Cullen, his poetry, 203, 204, 222.
+
+Burns, Robert, 213.
+
+Burroughs, John, chronic homesickness, 227, 228.
+
+
+Cactus, 248.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, 34, 35, 43, 47, 97;
+  contrasted with Emerson, 30;
+  correspondence with Emerson, 39, 40, 61, 80, 81;
+  on Webster, 61;
+  as a painter, 76, 77;
+  Emerson's love and admiration for, 79-82;
+  his style, 82.
+
+Channing, William Ellery, 2d, 138-40;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 9, 29, 30, 142;
+  in Thoreau's Journal, 149.
+
+City, the, 226, 227.
+
+Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, quoted, 276.
+
+Contrasts, 218-29.
+
+Country, life in the, 226-28.
+
+Critic, the professional, 259, 260.
+
+Criticism, 260.
+
+
+D., H., quoted, 277.
+
+Dana, Richard Henry, his "Two Years before the Mast," 256-58.
+
+Dargan, Olive Tilford, quoted, 201, 202.
+
+Darwin, Charles, criticism of his selection theories, 172-89, 193-98;
+  his "Voyage of the Beagle," 189-93;
+  his significance, 198-200.
+
+Days, memorable, 231.
+
+Death, thoughts on, 285-88.
+
+De Vries, Hugo, his mutation theory, 196, 197.
+
+Discovery, 223-25.
+
+
+Early and late, 230, 231.
+
+Eating, 77-79.
+
+Edison, Thomas A., 243, 269.
+
+Electricity, 231.
+
+Emerson, Charles, 5.
+
+Emerson, Dr. Edward W., on Thoreau, 155, 156.
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 136, 214, 227, 239;
+  Journals of, discussed, 1-85;
+  a new estimate of, 1-4;
+  and social intercourse, 6-8;
+  self-reliance, 8, 31, 32;
+  poet and prophet of the moral ideal, 9-11;
+  his lectures, 11, 12, 64, 65, 162;
+  his supreme test of men, 12, 13, 17;
+  his "Days," 14;
+  his "Humble-Bee," 14;
+  "Each and All," 15;
+  "Two Rivers," 15, 16;
+  on Poe, 16;
+  on Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," 17;
+  as a reader and a writer, 17, 18;
+  his main interests, 18;
+  on Jesus as a Representative Man, 20;
+  on Thoreau, 22, 23, 141, 156, 157;
+  and John Muir, 23, 24;
+  alertness, 24;
+  on Matthew Arnold, 25;
+  on Lowell, 25, 26;
+  on Alcott, 26-29;
+  on Father Taylor, 28, 29;
+  occupied with the future, 30;
+  his "Song of Nature," 30, 31;
+  near and far, past and present, 31, 32;
+  and human sympathy, 32, 33, 38, 39;
+  "Representative Men," 33;
+  attitude towards Whitman, 34, 253;
+  literary estimates, 34, 35;
+  on Wordsworth, 36;
+  correspondence with Carlyle, 39, 40;
+  love of nature, 41-43;
+  his book "Nature," 41, 43, 88, 89, 230;
+  his "May-Day," 43;
+  feeling for profanity and racy speech, 44-48;
+  humor, 45-48;
+  thoughts about God, 48-52;
+  attitude towards science, 52-60;
+  on Webster, 60-63;
+  religion, 63, 64;
+  self-criticism, 65-67;
+  "Terminus," 67;
+  catholicity, 67-70;
+  on the Bible, 70;
+  his selection of words, 70, 71;
+  ideas but no doctrines, 71, 72;
+  his limitations, 73-75;
+  and Hawthorne, 73-75;
+  a painter of ideas, 76, 77;
+  on eating and the artist, 77;
+  love and admiration for Carlyle, 79-82;
+  hungered for the quintessence of things, 84;
+  the last result of Puritanism, 85;
+  an estimate of, 86-92;
+  attitude towards poverty, 89;
+  weak in logic, 91;
+  passion for analogy, 92;
+  false notes in rhetoric, 92-94;
+  speaking with authority, 95;
+  at the Holmes breakfast, 95, 96;
+  his face, 96;
+  criticisms of, 96-101;
+  on beauty, 98, 99;
+  last words on, 102;
+  compared with Thoreau, 126;
+  intercourse with Thoreau, 156-58;
+  incident related by Thoreau, 158;
+  on Walter Scott, 216;
+  on oratory, 232;
+  a New England Thomas a Kempis, 261;
+  old age, 284, 285.
+
+Esopus, N. Y., 244.
+
+Ethical standards, 233.
+
+Everett, Edward, 223.
+
+Evolution, and the Darwinian theory, 174-89, 193-98;
+  chance in, 175-81;
+  the mutation theory, 196, 197;
+  Bergson reread, 264-66;
+  evolution of the doctrine, 279, 280.
+
+
+Farm, the home, 227, 228.
+
+Fist, the, 220, 221.
+
+Flagg, Wilson, Thoreau on, 165, 166.
+
+Flattery, 221, 222.
+
+Flowers, fadeless, 231.
+
+Fort Myers, 243.
+
+Fox, 135, 136.
+
+Fuller, Margaret, 7.
+
+
+Genius, and talent, 222, 223.
+
+Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 280.
+
+Germans, the, 3, 4.
+
+Gilchrist, Anne, on Emerson, 88.
+
+God, Emerson's idea of, 48-52;
+  Nature's, 233, 234.
+
+Goethe, 98.
+
+Gray, Eri, 244.
+
+Gray, Thomas, his "Elegy written in a Country Church-yard," 216.
+
+Grossmont, Cal., 240.
+
+
+H. D., quoted, 277.
+
+Hawaiian Islands, 236.
+
+Hawthorne, Nathaniel, and Emerson, 73-75.
+
+Hearn, Lafcadio, quoted, 202.
+
+Heat, 246.
+
+Hermits, 244.
+
+Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 253.
+
+History, the grand movements of, 249.
+
+Homesickness, 227-29.
+
+Howells, William Dean, 227;
+  an estimate, 262, 263.
+
+
+Insects, hum of, 244, 245.
+
+Invention, 223-26.
+
+
+James, Henry, his hypersensitiveness, 255, 256.
+
+James, William, quoted, 234.
+
+Journals, 4, 5.
+
+Juvenal, quoted, 242.
+
+
+Keator, Ike, 244.
+
+Kepler, Johann, quoted, 254.
+
+Kidd, Benjamin, his "Social Evolution," 270.
+
+Kingsley, Charles, a parable of, 189;
+  and Newman, 261.
+
+Knowledge, the Tree of, 248.
+
+
+Lamarck, 280.
+
+Landor, Walter Savage, Emerson and, 34, 35, 43.
+
+Life, the result of a system of checks and counter-checks, 236, 237.
+
+Lincoln, Abraham, 220, 221, 223.
+
+Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, in Emerson's Journals, 25.
+
+Loveman, Robert, his poetry, 204, 205;
+  quoted, 204, 205.
+
+Lowell, James Russell, in Emerson's Journals, 25;
+  criticism of Thoreau, 104-11;
+  love of books and of nature, 110, 111;
+  possessed talent but not genius, 223;
+  and Whitman, 253.
+
+
+McCarthy, John Russell, his poems, 204, 208, 223;
+  quoted, 214, 215, 223.
+
+Masefield, John, 208.
+
+Maui, 236.
+
+Meteoric men, 231, 232, 270-72.
+
+Milton, John, "Paradise Lost," 260;
+  quoted, 260.
+
+Montaigne, 8.
+
+Moody, William Vaughn, his poetry, 204-07;
+  quoted, 207.
+
+Morgan, Thomas Hunt, on Darwin, 200.
+
+Movements, in inert matter, 245.
+
+Muir, John, 23.
+
+Mutation theory, 196, 197.
+
+
+Natural history, and ethical and poetic values, 54-56.
+
+Natural selection, criticism of the theory, 178-89, 193-98.
+
+Newspapers, 272-74.
+
+"Noa Noa," 278.
+
+
+Old age, the psychology of, 281-85.
+
+Oratory, 232, 233.
+
+Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on chance in evolution, 175.
+
+
+Palm and fist, 220, 221.
+
+Pascal, Blaise, quoted, 233.
+
+Permanent, and transient, 218, 219.
+
+Phillips, Stephen, 270.
+
+Phillips, Wendell, 222, 232;
+  quoted, 221.
+
+Poe, Edgar Allan, 203;
+  Emerson on, 16, 74;
+  his poetry, 209-11.
+
+Poets, do not efface one another, 250, 251.
+
+Poetry, only the best significant, 201;
+  a discussion of, 201-17;
+  B.'s own, 203;
+  and philosophy, 203, 204, 207-09, 260;
+  not sweetened prose put up in verse form, 267;
+  red revolution in, 276-78.
+
+Pope, Alexander, 201.
+
+Positive and negative, 219, 220.
+
+Power, mankind drunk with, 248, 249.
+
+Praise, and flattery, 221, 222.
+
+Prayer, 233.
+
+
+Quotations, a book of, 261, 262.
+
+
+Rain, creative function of, 236.
+
+Rainbow, the, 137, 138.
+
+Rashness, 261.
+
+Reds of literature and art, the, 276-79.
+
+Reed, Sampson, 34, 35.
+
+Rhyme, 267.
+
+Ripley, Rev. Dr. Ezra, 45, 46.
+
+Robertson, Frederick William, 232.
+
+Rochefoucauld, quoted, 284.
+
+Roosevelt, Theodore, 220, 259, 272.
+
+Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 179.
+
+
+Sandburg, Carl, quoted, 276, 277.
+
+Santayana, George, quoted, 260.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, his poems, 216.
+
+Sea, the, 218.
+
+Sect, a queer, 243.
+
+Sexes, the, 238-40.
+
+Shakespeare, William, quoted, 242.
+
+Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 74.
+
+Sidney, Sir Philip, quoted, 267.
+
+Smith, Alexander, 270.
+
+Snake, mechanism for crushing eggs, 196.
+
+Snow, 252.
+
+Spanish-American War, 206.
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 280.
+
+Spiritualism, 267-69.
+
+Stanton, Edwin M., 221.
+
+Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 253.
+
+Style, 81-84, 256.
+
+Sublime, the, 251.
+
+Swift, Jonathan, 93, 267;
+  quoted, 223.
+
+Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 209, 254.
+
+
+Talent, and genius, 222, 223.
+
+Taylor, Edward T., 28, 29, 85.
+
+Telepathy, 267-69.
+
+Tennyson, Alfred, 41, 209, 250;
+  and Whitman, 254.
+
+Theories, absurd, 242, 243.
+
+Thomas a Kempis, 261;
+  quoted, 261.
+
+Thomson, J. Arthur, 96.
+
+Thoreau, Henry D., Journal of, 4, 5;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 20, 29;
+  compared with Emerson, 20-22;
+  his "Walden," 21;
+  "The Maine Woods," 21, 22;
+  "Cape Cod," 22;
+  Emerson on, 22, 23;
+  false notes in rhetoric, 93;
+  does not grow stale, 103;
+  ancestry, 104;
+  Lowell's criticism of, 104-11;
+  industry, 106;
+  philosophy and life, 108;
+  accomplishment, 109, 110;
+  his "Walden," 110, 143, 147;
+  humor, 110;
+  approving of Whitman, 111, 112;
+  as a nature writer, 112-20;
+  his Journal quoted and criticized, 113, 128, 134-37, 139-61, 163-65,
+                                     169, 170;
+  "Walden" quoted, 114-19, 137, 143, 146, 147;
+  travels, 119, 120;
+  uniqueness, 120, 121;
+  and science, 122;
+  individualism, 122, 123;
+  an extremist, 123, 124;
+  and civilization, 124, 125;
+  compared with Emerson, 126;
+  as a walker, 127-32;
+  his "Walking," 127-29;
+  his natural-history lore, 133-41;
+  faults as a writer, 141-46;
+  love of writing, 150;
+  literary activity, 153-55;
+  personality, 155-59;
+  and the Civil War, 159, 160;
+  and John Brown, 160;
+  inconsistencies, 160-62, 166;
+  his "Life without Principle," 162;
+  idealism, 162-68;
+  manual labor, 163-65;
+  moralizing on Bill Wheeler, 167, 168;
+  and human emotions, 168;
+  and young women, 168, 169;
+  as a philosopher, 169, 170;
+  merits as a man and a writer, 170, 171;
+  quoted, 242.
+
+Time, 241, 242.
+
+Timeliness, 230, 231.
+
+Torrey, Bradford, 134, 163.
+
+Town and country, 226-28.
+
+Transient, and permanent, 218, 219.
+
+Truth, 234, 235, 247.
+
+
+Verse, free, 276-78.
+
+Very, Jones, in Emerson's Journals, 9, 25;
+  Emerson's high opinion of, 35.
+
+"Vestiges of Creation," 280.
+
+Views, from mountain-tops, 240, 241.
+
+Virgil, quoted, 242.
+
+
+Walking, 127-32.
+
+Warbler, night, Thoreau's, 136.
+
+Wealth, 237, 238.
+
+Webster, Daniel, Emerson on, 60-63;
+  Carlyle on, 61.
+
+Weismann, August, 178.
+
+Wells, Dr. W. C., 280.
+
+Whitman, Walt, 94, 222, 227, 253, 278;
+  Emerson on "Leaves of Grass," 17;
+  in Emerson's Journals, 25;
+  Emerson's attitude towards, 34;
+  receives "May-Day" from Emerson, 43;
+  quoted, 100, 179, 202, 212, 250, 251, 254, 285;
+  Thoreau's approval of, 111, 112;
+  his philosophy, 208, 209;
+  as a criterion, 253, 254;
+  his faith in himself, 254.
+
+Whittier, John G., 92, 93;
+  and Whitman, 253.
+
+Wilkinson, Garth, 35.
+
+Wilson, Woodrow, 221, 232, 271.
+
+Winter, William, 253.
+
+Women, 238-40.
+
+Words, and style, 83, 84.
+
+Wordsworth, William, 216, 250, 251;
+  Emerson's estimate of, 36;
+  quoted, 100, 218;
+  a poet-walker, 130, 131;
+  on poetry and philosophy, 203;
+  great only at rare intervals, 212, 213.
+
+Wren, cactus, 248.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Harvest, by John Burroughs
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