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"The Last Days of John Brown" is a written speech delivered at an anti-slavery meeting at North Elba, Brown's home and burial-place, in July, 1860. It was not read by Thoreau himself, but by the secretary of the meeting, who informed the audience that he had lately received the manuscript from the hand of its author as he was passing through Concord on his way to North Elba. This essay, which was written after Brown's execution on Dec. 2nd, 1859 (on which day a memorial service was held in the Concord Town Hall by Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Thoreau, and other abolitionists 1), is supplementary to the " Plea," and is of especial interest to students of Thoreau's character as clearly demonstrating the fallacy of regarding him as one whose affections were wholly devoted to nature to the exclusion of man. "For my part," he says, in reference to Brown's death, "I commonly attend more to nature than to man; but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent." Here, at any rate, the charge of "stoicoepicurean adiaphorism" must be applied elsewhere than to Thoreau.

Thoreau's prophecy as to the momentous consequences of John Brown's martyrdom did not prove to be mistaken. "If this man's acts and words," he said, "do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do;" and within eighteen months from when these words were spoken, the civil

Referred to on p. 83.

war had commenced, and the northern armies were marching to the battlefield with John Brown's name as their watchword. By this time Thoreau himself had been struck down by his fatal illness; otherwise, as one who knew him has remarked, "there is no telling but what the civil war might have brought out a wholly new aspect of him, as it did for so many." Mr. Lowell, the most unsympathetic of all Thoreau's critics, has asserted that "while he studied with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny, of which the curtain had already risen." No evidence whatever is adduced in support of this statement, and it is on the face of it inconceivable that Thoreau, most uncompromising of abolitionists, should have been indifferent to the events of the war by which the question of slavery was to be decided. "Was it Thoreau, or Lowell," asks Colonel Wentworth Higginson, "who found a voice when the curtain fell, after the first act of that drama, upon the scaffold of John Brown?"

Enough has now been said to show that the application of the name adiaphorist to Thoreau is mistaken and misleading, since he was very far from being regardless of the welfare of his fellow-countrymen or of mankind in general. It is a complete error to imagine that a man whose convictions are so opposed to those of the majority as to seem whimsical and quixotic is necessarily an indifferentist, or that a protestant, an individualist, a solitary, and a free-lance, like Thoreau, is one whit less earnest a citizen because he is not content to make the course of his life conform to the ordinary social groove; the real indifferentists are rather they who find it easier

and more comfortable to swim with the tide, and to avoid placing themselves in antagonism to that “public opinion" which, in America, even more than in England, is so tremendous a power. The charge of indifferentism is therefore a perfectly vague and pointless one, unless it be shown that the indifference complained of relates to matters of real and vital import; to be unconcerned about trifles is one thing, to neglect matters of conscience is another. Now Thoreau, as we learn from the statements of those who knew him intimately, was absolutely indifferent to many things which the man of the world holds dear; he did not care for money, or personal comforts, or fine clothes, or success in business, or the innumerable cumbersome trappings, physical and intellectual, which are foolishly supposed, by those who have never tried to dispense with them, to be an essential part of modern civilization. It was his opinion that “ a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone"; and his general attitude on this point may be gathered from that typical reply of his, when he was asked which dish he would prefer at table"The nearest.".

But in all cases where principle was at stake, Thoreau's will was as inflexible as the cast iron to which Hawthorne compared him; herein contrasting sharply with the mental and moral pliability of the ordinary member of society. "No man," he says, "ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience." In his fine essay on "Life without Principle," he re-enforces those salutary

though unpopular lessons of integrity and hardihood which form the moral of Walden, pointing out, with all the incisiveness of speech and felicity of illustration for which his style is conspicuous, the follies and sophisms which underlie the worldly wisdom on which much of our civilized life is based-the useless toil which is dignified with the name of industry; the degradation and loss of freedom by which a so-called "independency" is too often purchased; the immorality of the various methods of trading and money-making, respectable or the contrary; the hollowness of much that passes as science or religion; and the ineptitudes and frivolities of social intercourse, which can corrupt and weaken the strength and sanctity of the mind. The conclusion of the whole matter brings us back to the lesson which Thoreau is never tired of repeating the need of individuality and real personal development. "It is for want of a man," he tells us, in one of his epigrammatic, paradoxical utterances, "that there are so many men.' Thoreau's gospel of social reform may perhaps be not unfairly summed up in one word-simplicity. He would have each individual test for himself the advantages or disadvantages of the various customs and appliances which have gradually been amassed in a complex and artificial state of society, and make sure that in continuing to employ them he does so from an actual preference, and not from mere force of habit and tradition.

It has been wittily said of Thoreau, by Dr. O. W. Holmes, that he was a would-be "nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end." But in reality there is no such conflict between

simplicity of living and the higher civilization-indeed, a true refinement will never be realized until men have learned the wisdom and pleasure of the course which Thoreau inculcates. It is important to emphasize the fact that it is not civilization in general, but the particular vices incidental to civilization, against which his censure is directed. While recognising that the civilized state is preferable to the uncivilized, he yet maintains that the latter is free from certain evils by which the former is afflicted, and urges that "we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage" of organized society. "To combine the hardiness of the savage with the intellectualness of the civilized man " was the problem to which Thoreau invited the attention of a self-indulgent and luxurious age, and in pursuing this course he did not scruple to avow his contempt for many of the pious fictions of conventional life. The "Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers," apart from their worth as literature, afford a valuable corrective of the erroneous notion that the man who preached this gospel of simplicity was unable to sympathize with the higher interests and aspirations of mankind. Not such was the opinion of those who had the best opportunity of judging him, as may be seen from the following memorial lines,' which convey no empty panegyric, but a faithful tribute to the character of one of the justest and humanest of the real men of genius whom America has yet produced :

A. Bronson Alcott's " Sonnets and Canzonets."