The other, open-eyed and cheerful amid the sunlit world, feels himself near the heart of living things. The one is a theologian; the other is a poet. For all his interest in the hazier transcendentalists and his admiration for the stupendous absurdities of Swedenborg, Thoreau is less near to the religious mystic than to the nature poet of all times, and especially to Wordsworth. Thoreau's spirit is that of a poet, though his verses are not good, for he was wanting in "the decisive gift of lyrical expression," as Emerson says of Plato and might have said of himself. Like his contemporaries, Thoreau misreads Nature as a collection of moral lessons, but he is not blind to her naked loveliness, and he finds her lessons not austere, but consoling. "Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment and childlike mirthfulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.”

Mystic and transcendentalist, he is not a foggy-minded dreamer with his head lost in vacant unrealities. He lived not ascetically, but heartily, and could have said on his deathbed like Hazlitt that he had had a happy life. He did not shrink from facts like some other poets who have fled stricken to the shadowy woods. He looked upon things courageously. But he had his private criteria of what was worth looking at. His quarrel with politicians is characteristic. He is contemptuous of them, not because they are engaged in sordid matters, not because they are “practical” (the sentimentalist's charge against them), but because they are not earnestly busy at the tasks they pretend to engage in. They are poor politicians. "They who have been bred

in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts,"

he says.

In his wonderful essay, "Life Without Principle," he says: "I have often been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age, I embarked." So he sailed, a clear-eyed steersman, content and confident as in the canoe which he paddled on Concord River, to that morrow - the concluding words of "Walden"- "which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning-star.”

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. He graduated at Harvard in 1837; in those days there was a fee of five dollars for the diploma, and Thoreau, who had an unusually good sense of values, refused to pay the price of the parchment. He spent the rest of his life in and about Concord, whence he made excursions to Cape Cod, Maine, New Hampshire, Canada. He supported himself by teaching school, making lead-pencils, surveying and farming. He gave a few lectures and published two books. Emerson

expresses his life in compact negations: "He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the state; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist he used neither gun nor rod." It should be added that he did not always live alone, for he lived with Emerson a little while, paying his board by his labour. Emerson edited four of his posthumous volumes.

His works are: A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, 1849; Walden, 1854; Excursions, 1863; The Maine Woods, 1864; Cape Cod, 1865; Letters, 1865; A Yankee in Canada, 1866; Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881; Summer, 1884; Winter, 1887; Autumn, 1892; Miscellanies, 1893; Journals, edited by Bradford Torrey, 1906.

The life of Thoreau is written in his journals and letters with the admirable introductions by his friends, Emerson and Mr. F. B. Sanborn. The Life by his other friend, W. E. Channing, called "Thoreau: Poet-Naturalist," is important but fatuous. A good English biography is that by H. A. Page (Dr. Alexander Japp), "Thoreau: His Life and Aim." Stevenson's essay in "Familiar Studies of Men and Books" is good Stevenson but poor Thoreau; and the paragraphs about the essay in the preface are just as good Stevenson but still worse Thoreau. Lowell's Essay is the work of an extraordinarily brilliant snob. See also the Life by H. S. Salt, and the Life by F. B. Sanborn in American Men of Letters.

CHAPTER XI

LOWELL

There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme;
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders;
The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;
His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,
But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell,
And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem,

At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem.

IN THIS lampoon of himself in the clattering "Fable for Critics," Lowell confesses one of his defects, and he exhibits another his verbal carelessness and lack of metrical finesse. He also displays very attractive virtues, genial willingness to apply his critical candour to his own talents, and freedom from the more solemn sort of literary pose. He began his career with some slight verses, sincere in thought and not unskilful, though technically stiff and hasty with the haste that betrays itself. He was moved, at least in his youth, by noble enthusiasms; he studied the poets ancient and modern with unfeigned ardour; he became a competent, even acute, analyst of the technique of poetry; his impulse to utter his feelings in song did not abate with

youth but continued all his life. Yet he wrote no perfect poem in classic English (if classic is the word to discriminate what is not in dialect); no poem of his sings itself, flies on its own wings or, to use its own words, "maintains itself by virtue of a happy coalescence of matter and style." The old way of expressing his failure is to say that he was not a born poet, which explains nothing but suggests what is wanting in the verse of a man who had most of the namable abilities and motives that make a poet. Life-long devotion to poetry, an unusually wide acquaintance with the resources of language, elevated thoughts and an intense desire to say them, all are his; the music simply does not happen. It is not the burden of his isms alone that keeps him on the lower paths of Parnassus. Milton, Coleridge, Shelley were heavily laden with intellectual theses. The glorious company of pre-Raphaelites often set up a lecture-stand in their aerie and engage in a bewildering babel of disputes on social, political and æsthetic problems. Poets are thinkers and are not inferior to their prosaic brothers in their love of argument or the zeal with which they hug their opinions. A true poet can carry any intellectual burden and not be hindered by it. Lowell had no quality, no interest, no occupation, chosen or enforced, which might not be of real service to a poet; no pack of fardels bound him to earth. His disability was not a positive but a negative thing.

He was profoundly ambitious; he took his work seriously and felt deeply what he had to say. In an early poem, "An Incident in a Railroad Car," he describes the effect of Burns on simple men. The poem rings true; it is free