THOREAU'S LETTERS.

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Emerson painted with a big brush. Thoreau is more original in the minutiae of description, only appreciable by professed naturalists; and in his Letters, where he sends, as "from peak to peak of Olympus," messages to friends, of a stoicism more severe, perhaps more consistent, but therefore even more impracticable, than his master's.

Thoreau's writing invites extract. From his premeditated mots, wise or startling, deep or shallow, but all lucent, one might construct a volume of anthology. Among those cameos of English prose we may select the following:

"Aim above morality; there is not necessarily any ugly fact which may not be eradicated from life." "What a wedge, what a beetle, what a catapult is an earnest man: what can resist him!" "Let our meanness be our footstool, not our cushion." "The smallest seed of faith is worth more than the largest fruit of happiness." "Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow; but tend and cherish it. . . . To regret deeply is to live a fast." "The talent of composition is very dangerous-the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the Indian takes off a scalp. I feel as if my life had grown more outward when I can express it." "The old mythology is incomplete without a god or goddess of sincerity, on whose altars we might offer up all the products of our farms, our workshops, and our studies. It should be our Lar when we sit on the hearth, and our Tutelar Genius when we walk abroad. . . . I mean sincerity in our dealings with ourselves mainly; the other is comparatively easy." "That we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have but little faithfulness. By faithfulness faith is earned." My saddest sorrows are apt to be but transient regrets. . . . I am of kin to the sod, and partake largely of its dull patience-in winter expecting the sun of spring." "Man is continually saying to woman, Why will you not be more wise? Woman is continually saying to man, Why will you not be more loving? It is not in their wills to be wise or loving; but unless each is both wise and loving there can be neither wisdom nor love." "Hate can pardon more than love." "Love must be as much a light as a flame." "Walt Whitman . . . does not celebrate love at It is as if the beasts spoke," but "if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we complain of?"

all.

Thoreau's hard sense or solid scepticism is exhibited conspicuously in his utter antagonism to the "Manifestations" that were then so frequent and fashionable in some New England circles—

...

"Most people here" (i.e. in Concord) "believe in . . . spirits which the very bull-frogs in our meadows would black-ball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. If I could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, I should . . . buy a share in the first Immediate Annihilation Company that offered. I would exchange my immortality for a glass of small beer. . . . Where are the heathen? Was there ever any superstition before? And yet I suppose there may be a vessel, this very moment, setting sail from the coast of North America to that of Africa with a missionary on board. Consider the dawn and the sunrise, the rainbow and the evening, the words of Christ and the aspirations of all the saints! Hear music, see, smell, taste, feel anything, and then hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly asking, Please, spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table'!!!"

Emerson writes exultingly of America, "The world has no such landscape, the æons of history no such hour," and yet in the same volume confesses, "Our politics are disgusting . . they were never more corrupt and brutal; and Trade, that pride and darling of our ocean, that educator of nations, that benefactor in spite of itself, ends in shameful defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy all over the world." Thoreau, with a modified optimism, exhibits an even keener contempt for the Exchange and fiercer recoil from Wall Street

"Not merely the Brook Farm and Fourierite communities, but now the community generally has failed. . . . Men will tell you sometimes that 'money's hard.' That shows it was not made to eat, I say. . . . As if one struggling in mid-ocean with a bag of gold on his back should gasp out, I am worth a hundred thousand dollars.' I see them struggling just as ineffectually on dry land. . . . This general failure, both private and public, is rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the helm. . . . If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world would be staggered. . . . If thousands are thrown out of employment, it suggests that they were not well employed. Why don't they take the hint? It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants."

How true, how hard! So are most of the scintillations from this crystal, colder if clearer than the rays of the opal

over the way. Parents in literature and art, have, as a rule, little philoprogenitiveness. They are apt to regard their offspring as superfluities, lusus naturæ, or mocking-birds. But the father in this case is generously affectionate to his firstborn man-child, on whose grave he has flung the fairest votive wreath :

"There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called 'life-everlasting' it is named by the Swiss Edelweiss, which signifies noble purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. . . . The country knows not yet or in the least part how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst of his broken task, which none else can accomplish—a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that it should depart out of nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he was. But he at least is content. His soul was made for the noblest society. He had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world. Wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a throne."

Y

CHAPTER X.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

men.

"ERNEST began to speak, giving to the people of what was in his heart and mind. His words had power because they accorded with his thoughts; and his thoughts had reality and depth, because they harmonised with the life that he had always lived." It is pleasant to believe that the noble apologue of The Great Stone Face (from which the words are taken) is a tribute paid by the novelist to the philosopher of Concord, and that these sentences are designed to disclose, as they do, the secret of Mr. Emerson's influence over his countryTheir writer had little sympathy with the Transcendental movement, headed by his contemporary. He preferred loitering "by the river's brim" to Neo-Platonic rhapsodies, and scraps of the Vedas. Buried in his retreat, and in the moonlight of his own mysticism, he cast a half compassionate smile on the pilgrims who thronged to the neighbouring cottage as to an oracular shrine-“Young visionaries to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life a labyrinth around them, coming to seek the clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment; grayheaded theorists whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, travelling painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom." Quaint and characteristic satire! but

THE "OLD MANSE."

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the satirist united with the devotees in admiring the genius and purity of the thinker. "It was good," he says, "to meet him in the woodpaths or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one."

Half a mile from Emerson's house, within view of the bridge where, a century ago,

"The embattled farmers stood

Who fired the shot heard round the world,"

between two tall gateposts of rough-hewn stone, terminating the vista of an avenue of black ash-trees, we catch sight of the Old Manse, which, for three years, sheltered the foremost prose artist of America. It was here that Nathaniel Hawthorne gathered his mosses; and, from one of the gray windows, looked on "the hitherto obscure waters," where they "gleam forth into history," congratulating the Assabeth on "the incurable indolence by which it is saved from becoming the slave of human ingenuity-the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered towards its eternity, the sea." No river of such slight proportions has ever been described as Hawthorne has described this, perhaps half-unconsciously finding in it an emblem of his own life and character.

"In the light,” he tells us, "of a calm and golden sunset, it is the more lovely for the quietude that so well accords with the hour; when even the wind, after blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest. Every tree and rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and however unsightly in reality assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are pictured equally without effort, and with the same felicity of success. All the sky glows downward at our feet: the rich clouds float through the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a peaceful heart. We will not then malign our river as gross and impure while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the heaven that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul has an infinite spiritual capacity, and may contain the better world within its depths."