The Maine Woods

His choice of subjects, too, involves the same double recompense ; for no books are less dazzling or more immortal than those whose theme is external Nature. Nothing else wears so well. History becomes so rapidly overlaid with details, and its aspects change so fast, that the most elaborate work soon grows obsolete ; while a thoroughly sincere and careful book on Nature cannot be superseded, and lives forever. Its basis is real and permanent. There will always be birds and flowers, nights and mornings. The infinite fascinations of mountains and of forests will outlast this war, and the next, and the race that makes the war. The same solidity of material which has guarantied permanence to the fame of Izaak Walton and White of Selborne will as surely secure that of Thoreau, who excels each of these writers upon his own ground, while superadding a wider culture, a loftier thought, and a fine, though fantastic, literary skill. All men may not love Nature, but all men ultimately love her lovers. And of those lovers, past or present, Thoreau is the most profound in his devotion, and the most richly repaid.

Against these great merits are to be set, no doubt, some formidable literary defects : an occasional mistiness of expression, like the summit of Katahdin, as he himself describes it, — one vast fog, with here and there a rock protruding ; also, an occasional sandy barrenness, like his beloved Cape Cod. In truth, lie never quite completed the transition from the observer to the artist. With the power of constructing sentences as perfectly graceful as a hemlock-bough, he yet displays the most wayward aptitude for literary caterpillar s’-nests and all manner of disfigurements. The same want of artistic habit appears also in his wilful disregard of all rules of proportion. He depicts an Indian, for instance, with such minute observation and admirable verbal skill that one feels as if neither Catlin nor Schoolcraft ever saw the actual creature ; but though the table-talk of the aboriginal may seem for a time more suggestive than that of Coleridge or Macaulay, yet there is a point beyond which his, like theirs, becomes a bore.

In addition to these drawbacks, one finds in Thoreau an unnecessary defiance of tone, and a very resolute non-appreciation of many things which a larger mental digestion can assimilate without discomfort. In his dealings with Nature he is sweet, genial, patient, wise. In his dealings with men he exasperates himself over the least divergence from the desired type. Before any over - tendency to the amenities and luxuries of civilization, in particular, he becomes unreasonable and relentless. Hence there appears something hard and ungenial in his views of life, utterly out of keeping with the delicate tenderness which he shows in the woods. The housekeeping of bees and birds be finds noble and beautiful, but for the home and cradle of the humblest human pair he can scarcely be said to have even toleration ; a farmer’s barn he considers a cumbrous and pitiable appendage, and lie lectures the Irishwomen in their shanties for their undue share of the elegancies of life. With infinite faith in the tendencies of mineral and vegetable nature, in human nature he shows no practical trust, and must even be severe upon the babies in the Maine log - huts for playing with wooden dolls instead of pine-cones. It is, indeed, noticeable that he seems to love every other living animal more unreservedly than the horse,—as if this poor sophisticated creature, though still a quadruped and a brother, had been so vitiated by undue intimacy with man as to have become little better than if he wore broadcloth and voted.

Yet there was not in Thoreau one trait of the misanthrope ; his solitary life at Walden was not chosen because he loved man less, but because be loved Nature more ; and any young poet or naturalist might envy the opportunities it gave him. But his intellectual habits showed always a tendency to exaggeration, and be spent much mental force in fighting shadows. Church and State, war and politics,— a man of solid vigor must find room in his philosophy to tolerate these matters for a time, even if he cannot cordially embrace them. But Thoreau, a celibate, and at times a hermit, brought the Protestant extreme to match the Roman Catholic, and though he did not personally ignore one duty of domestic life, he yet held a system which would have excluded wife and child, house and property. His example is noble and useful to all high-minded young people, but only when interpreted by a philosophy less exclusive than his own. In urging his one social panacea, “Simplify, I say, simplify,” he failed to see that all steps in moral or material organization are really efforts after the same process he recommends. The sewing-machine is a more complex affair than the needle, but it simplifies every woman’s life, and helps her to that same comparative freedom from care which Thoreau would seek only by reverting to the Indian blanket.

But many-sided men do not move in battalions, and even a one-sided philosopher may be a boon to think of, if he be as noble as Thoreau. His very defects are higher than many men’s virtues, and his most fantastic moralizings will bear reading without doing harm, especially during a Presidential campaign. Of his books, “ Walden ” will probably be permanently reckoned as the best, as being the most full and deliberate exhibition of the author’s mind, and as extracting the most from the least material. It is also the most uniform in texture, and the most complete in plan, while the ‘‘ Week ” has no unity but that of the chronological epoch it covers,— a week which is probably the most comprehensive on record, ranging from the Bhagvat-Geetha to the “good time coming,”—and the “Excursions” no unity but that of the covers which comprise them, being, indeed, a compilation of his earliest and latest essays. Which of his four volumes contains his finest writing it would really be hard to say ; but in structure the present book comes nearest to “ Walden ” ; it is within its limits a perfect monograph of the Maine woods. All that has been previously written fails to portray so vividly the mysterious life of the lonely forest, — the grandeur of Katahdin or Ktaadn, that hermitmountain,— and the wild and adventurous navigation of those Northern water-courses whose perils make the boating of the Adirondack region seem safe and tame. The book is also more unexceptionable healthy in its tone than any of its predecessors, and it is pleasant to find the author, on emerging from his explorations, admitting that the confines of civilization afford, after all, the best residence, and that the wilderness is of most value as “a resource and a background.”

There yet remain for publication Thoreau’s adventures on Cape Cod ; his few public addresses on passing events, especially those on the Burns Rescue and the John-Brown affair, which were certainly among the very ablest productions called forth by those exciting occasions ; his poems ; and his private letters to his friend Blake, of Worcester, and to others, — letters which certainly contain some of his toughest, and perhaps also some of his finest writing. All these deserve, and must one day receive, preservation. He who reads most books reads that which has a merely temporary interest, and will be presently superseded by something better ; but Nature has waited many centuries for Thoreau, and we can hardly expect to see, during this generation, another mortal so favored with her confidence.