Henry D. Thoreau.

  Again the resemblance is very striking when we find Thoreau inveighing against the luxury of the railroad car, with its divans and ottomans and velvet cushions and “a malaria all the way.”

  Many, too, are his strictures on the monstrous ugliness of recent American architecture, and his meditations on the sacred delight of a man building his own dwelling, as he himself did at Walden, and lingering lovingly over foundation, doors, windows, hearth, and every other detail. When he considers how flimsily modern houses are in general built, paid for or not paid for, as the case may be, he expresses his wonder that “the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through to the cellar, to some solid and honest, though earthy, foundation.” Like Ruskin again, Thoreau declines to yield homage to the supremacy of the nineteenth century, even on the score of such boasted modern inventions as the Telegraph and Post Office, for he insists that he only received one or two letters in all his life that were worth the postage, and that the Telegraph cannot greatly benefit those who, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. For newspapers also, and all the trivialities of newspaper gossip, he had a profound contempt, caring nothing to read of men robbed or murdered, houses blown up, vessels wrecked, or cows run over on the railroad, because he could discover nothing memorable in this. Even books were not always found desirable: there being times when he could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work,”—a remark which reminds one of Ruskin’s statement that he never reads in the spring-time. In like manner Thoreau was in no way interested in the ordinary conversation of “society;” for, as he characteristically observes, “a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will.” The author of Fors Clavigera has there put it oil record that he could never contemplate a visit to a country which has no castles; if however he had visited America during Thoreau’s lifetime, I think he might have found a compensation even for this great disadvantage. At any rate, he might have met one kindred spirit across the Atlantic, one man who cared so little for party politics that he never voted, and who, amidst all the hurry and fluster of his enterprising countrymen, preferred travelling on foot to being jerked along on a railroad.

  Mr. Lowell, in an essay on Thoreau in My Study Windows, finds fault with him for this hostility to the tendency of his age. He complains of his exaggerated idea of self-importance, which led him (according to the critic’s view) to prize a lofty way of thinking, “not so much because it was good in itself as because he wished few to share it with him.” I think this is very unfair to Thoreau, and due to a complete lack of sympathy with the spirit in which he wrote. Still more surprising is the assertion that Thoreau was the victim of a morbid self-consciousness, and that his didactic style was the outcome of an unhealthy mind! It is an unprofitable task for an admirer of a great man to combat charges such as these, which are only another proof, if proof were needed, of the fact that one man of genius is often lamentably and ludicrously unable to recognize and appreciate the merits of another, and that the best writers are often the most erroneous critics. It is impossible to estimate rightly any literary work, unless one is to some extent in sympathy with the aims and objects of the author; a qualification which Mr. Lowell certainly does not possess in the case of Thoreau. The culminating absurdity of his criticism is reached when he asserts that Thoreau “had no humour.” The author of Walden destitute of humour! Even Mr. Matthew Arnold’s recent dictum, that Shelley’s literary immortality will be due to his prose writings rather than his poems, must yield the place of honour among the curiosities of criticism to this amazing and unsurpassable utterance on the part of the author of the Biglow Papers.

  There is one aspect of Thoreau’s teaching which is scarcely mentioned by his biographers, though it is of considerable importance in forming a just estimate of his character; I refer to his humanitarian views. His hatred of war is very strongly expressed in those passages where he condemns the iniquitous attack which the United States were then making on Mexico; war, he says, is “a damnable business;” since those concerned in it, “soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, powder-monkeys, and all,” are in reality peaceably inclined, and are forced to fight against their common sense and consciences.¹⁰ Of his detestation of the system of slavery I shall have occasion to speak further on. But Thoreau went much further than this; his humanity was shown not only in his relation to men, but also in his dealings with the lower animals. Emerson tells us that, though a naturalist, Thoreau used neither trap nor gun—a fact which must have been independently noticed by all readers of Walden or the diaries. It was his habit to eat no flesh: though with characteristic frankness he confesses to having once slaughtered and devoured a wood-chuck which ravaged his bean field. He laughs at the farmer who tells him that it is not possible to live on vegetable food alone, walking at that very time behind the oxen, “which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.” Yet at the same time, it must be admitted that he was not a consistent vegetarian, for we find constant mention of his fishing in Walden Pond, and his dinner was sometimes composed of “a mess of fish.” This apparent contradiction in Thoreau’s dietetic philosophy is explained in that chapter of Walden which is headed “Higher Laws,” where we find the fullest statement of his views on the humanitarian question. He begins by remarking that he finds in himself two instincts—one towards a higher and more spiritual life; the other, the hunting-instinct, towards a primitive and savage state. He reverences both of these instincts, being of opinion that there is a period in the history of individuals, as of the race, when the hunters are the best men.” It is natural, he thinks, that boys and youths should wish to shoulder a fowling-piece and betake themselves to the woods; but (and here is the essence of Thoreau’s teaching on this subject) “at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind.” Thoreau himself had sold his gun long before his sojourn at Walden, and though he did not feel the same scruple about fishing, he nevertheless confesses that he could not fish “without falling off a little in self-respect.” This leads him to dwell on the whole question of food, and he states his own opinion as being very strongly in favour of a purely vegetarian diet, which is at once more cleanly, more economical, and more moral than the usual system of flesh-food.¹¹ “Whatever my own practice may be,” he adds “I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual inprovement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.” This is Thoreau’s testimony to that particular branch of the humanitarian· movement; and it is perhaps the more valuable testimony as coming from a perfectly unprejudiced witness, one who, as he himself says, could at times “eat a fried rat with good relish.”

  The last point connected with Thoreau’s teaching on which it will be necessary to enter, is the subject of politics. And here one might be tempted to state briefly, and once for all, that Thoreau had nothing to do with politics; and thus follow the example of that writer on natural history, mentioned by De Quincey, who, after heading a chapter with the words “Concerning the Snakes of Iceland,” proceeded to remark, “There are no snakes in Iceland.” But though Thoreau was no politician in the ordinary use of the word, and never voted in his life, yet, in another sense, he took a good deal of interest in American state-affairs, especially during the latter years of his life, and left several pamphlets and lectures of the highest possible merit . . In his essay on Civil Disobedience, he gives expression to that strong feeling of individualism which caused him to resent the meddling and muddling propensities, as they seemed to him, of American government, as seen in the Mexican war abroad, and slavery at home. “Must the citizen,” he asks, “resign his conscience to the legislator?” In one way he felt he could make a vigorous protest, and that was on the occasion when he confronted the Government in the person of its tax-collector. He refused to pay the poll-tax, and was on this account put into prison, the true place, as he says, for a just man, “under a Government that imprisons any unjustly.” His own account of his own incarceration, and the night he spent in prison, may be found, told in his best and most incisive style, in this same essay on Civil Disobedience. The two main causes of his withdrawal of his allegiance to the state were, as I have already said, the aggressive war waged on Mexico and the maintenance of slavery in Massachusetts; he did not care “to trace the course of his dollar,” paid in taxes to the State, “till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with.” On the subject of slavery he was strongly and profoundly moved. There is reason to believe that his hut at Walden was used as “a station on the great under-ground railway—a refuge for the victims of the slave trade.”¹² No more powerful and eloquent indictment of the iniquities of that unholy traffic was ever published than in his three papers on Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown, and The Last Days of John Brown. Those who have hitherto imagined Thoreau to have been a mere recluse, interesting only as a hermit in an age when hermits were somewhat out of date, will be obliged to reconsider their opinion, if they take into consideration these splendid essays, so full of sound common sense, trenchant satire, and noble enthusiasm for humanity.

  But it is time now to bid farewell to Thoreau in his character of philosopher and moralist, and to view him awhile in another light. He has been well called by Ellery Channing the “Poet-Naturalist;” for to the ordinary qualifications of the naturalist-patience, watchfulness, and precision-he added in a rare degree the genius and inspiration of the poet. He may be described as standing midway between old Gilbert White of Selborne, the naturalist par excellence, and Michelet, the impassioned writer of that wonderful book L’Oiseau. He had all that amazing knowledge of the country, its Fauna and Flora, which characterized Gilbert White, his familiarity with every bird, beast, insect, fish, reptile, and plant, being something little less than miraculous to the ordinary unobservant townsman. Very suggestive of Selborne, too, was ‘that pocket-diary of Thoreau’s, in which were entered the names of all the native Concord plants, and the date of the day on which each would bloom. “His power of observation,” Emerson tells us, “seems to indicate additional senses.” On the other hand, he equalled Michelet—and it is scarcely possible to give him greater praise than this-in that still higher creative power, which can draw from a scientific fact of natural history a poetical thought or image to be applied to the life of man. As Michelet could see in the heron the type of fallen grandeur, the dispossessed monarch still haunting the scenes of his former glory; or in the woodpecker the sturdy solitary workman of the forest, neither gay nor sad in mood, but happy in the performance of his ceaseless task; so Thoreau delighted in idealising and moralizing on the facts which he noted in his daily rambles by forest, river, or pond. He sees the pin-cushion galls on the young white oaks in early summer, the most beautiful object of the woods, though but a disease and excrescence, “beautiful scarlet sins, they may be.” “Through our temptations,” he adds, “ay, and our falls, our virtues appear.” Countless instances of this kind of thought could be picked out from his diaries and the pages of Walden, in fact, Thoreau has been blamed, and not altogether without reason, for carrying this moralizing tendency to excess-a fault which he perhaps acquired through the influence of the Transcendental movement. In love of birds he certainly yielded no whit to Michelet himself; and he is never weary of recording his encounters with the bob-o’-links, cat-birds, whip-poor-wills, chickadees, and numerous other species. His paper on the Natural History of Massachusetts gives a short and pithy summary of his experience in this subject; but he had usually a strange dislike of writing detached memoirs, preferring to let the whole subject rest undivided in his mind. His studies as naturalist were too much a part of his whole character to be kept separate from the rest, and must therefore be sought for throughout the whole body of his works. This intense love of woodcraft, together with his taste for all Indian lore, and all hunting adventure, gives a wild and racy charm to Thoreau’s books which often reminds one of Defoe and other early writers. On the subject of fishing not even Izaak Walton himself could write as Thoreau has done, though one is somewhat reminded of the father of the “gentle craft” in reading passages such as the following:¹³ “Who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below low-water mark, bearing up against a hard destiny? Thou shalt ere long have thy way up all the rivers, if I am not mistaken. Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized. Keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet.” Still more wonderful are the descriptions of the weird and mysterious characteristics of fishing-the cork that goes dancing down the stream when suddenly “emerges this fabulous inhabitant of another element, a thing heard of but not seen, as if it were the creation of an eddy, a true product of the running stream;” or, still more memorable, the midnight fishing on Walden Pond when the angler, anchored in forty feet of water, “communicated with a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes” below, now and then feeling a vibration along the line “indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, some dull uncertain blundering purpose.” If Thoreau could thus sympathise with the mysteries of fish-life, we are the better able to believe when biographers more than once tell us, the fishes often swam into his hand and would allow him to lift them out of the water, to the unspeakable amazement of his companions in the boat. His influence over animals seems [illegible] to have been little less than miraculous, and [illegible] calls many of the legends of the anchorites [illegible] the Middle Ages, and of St. Francis d’ Assisi As Kingsley has pointed out in his Hermits, the power of attracting wild animals was doubtless in large measure due to the hermits’ habits sitting motionless for hours, and their perfect freedom from anger or excitement, so that there is nothing absurd or improbable in such stories as those of the swallows sitting and singing on the knees of St. Guthlac, or the robin building its nest in St. Karilef s hood. Much the same is recorded of Thoreau’s habitual patience and immobility. Emerson tells us that “he knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him.” Of all such stories of strange sympathy between men and the lower animals none are so beautiful as those recorded in the life of St. Francis; but certainly Thoreau may claim the honour of having approached nearest in modern times to that sense of perfect brotherhood and sympathy with all innocent creatures. There is a singular resemblance between the legend of the tench which followed the boat in which St. Francis was praying; and some of the anecdotes told about Thoreau.

  Thoreau’s retirement to Walden has naturally moved many people to consider him as a sort of modern hermit, and the attraction he exercised over the inhabitants of the woods and waters was only one of many points of resemblance. There was the same recognition of the universal brotherhood of men, the same scorn of the selfish luxury and childish amusements of society, and the same impatience of the farce which men [illegible] all “politics,” the same desire of self-concentration and undisturbed thought. Thoreau also possessed, in a marked degree, that power of suddenly and strongly influencing those who conversed with him, which was so characteristic of the hermits. Young men who visited him were often converted in a moment to the belief “that this was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do.”¹⁴ But it would be a grievous wrong to Thoreau to allow this comparison, a just one up to a certain point, to be drawn out beyond its fair limits. He was something more than a solitary. He had higher aims than the anchorites of old. He went to the woods, as he himself has told us, because he wished “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” So far he was like the hermits of the east. But it was only a two-years’ sojourn, not a life-visit, that he made to Walden; his object was not merely to retire, but to fit himself for a more perfect life. He left the woods “for as good reason as he went there,” feeling that he had several more lives to live, and could not spare more time for that one. Even while he lived at Walden he visited his family and friends at Concord every two or three days; indeed, one of his biographers¹⁵ asserts that he “bivouacked “ at Walden rather than actually lived there, though this is hardly the impression conveyed by Thoreau himself or other authorities. Very different also was Thoreau in his complete freedom from the morbid asceticism and unhealthy habit of body, which too often distinguished the hermits. His frugality was deliberate and rational, based on the belief that the truest health and happiness must be sought in wise and unvarying moderation; but there was no trace of any unreasoning asceticism; his object being to vivify, not mortify, the flesh. His nature was essentially simple and vigorous; he records in his diary¹⁶ that he thought bathing one of the necessaries of life, and wonders what kind of religion could be that of a certain New England farmer, who told him he had not had a bath for fifteen years. Now we read of St. Antony—and the same is told of most other hermits—that he never washed his body with water, and could not endure even to wet his feet; dirtiness therefore must be considered a sine qua non in the character of a true hermit, and this would entirely disqualify Thoreau for being ranked in that class. It is at once pleasanter and more correct, if we must make any comparisons at all, to compare him to the philosopher Epictetus, who lived in the vicinity of Rome in a little hut which had not so much as a door, his only attendant being an old servant-maid, and his property consisting of little more than an earthen lamp. Thoreau had the advantage over the Stoic in having no servant-maid at Walden; but as he indulged himself in a door, we may fairly set one luxury against the other, and the two philosophers may be classed on the whole as equally praiseworthy examples of a consistent simplicity and hardihood.

  Before proceeding to consider the literary value of Thoreau’s writings, I will say a few words more about his character and general mode of life. His bodily vigour is mentioned by all who have written of him,¹⁷ and all lay stress on his wonderful fitness of body and mind, which remind us of some of Charles Kingsley’s best features of character. He ate little flesh, drank no wine, seldom used tea, coffee, butter, milk, and refused to be “upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner.” At Walden he often made a satisfactory meal off a dish of purslane boiled and salted, or the ears of green sweet-corn. He baked his own bread, leavened at first, but afterwards without yeast, according to a recipe of M. P. Cato, published two centuries before Christ. Side by side with this sturdy independence, he possessed a wide catholic spirit of humanity and sympathy with the whole human race; he will not be better or worse than his fellow-men. We are reminded of the writings of Walt Whitman himself, the greatest literary figure among all Thoreau’s fellow-countrymen, when we hear him saying, “I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.”¹⁸ I have already said that Thoreau was full of reverence for all religion and antiquity. He was deeply interested in all that related to the aboriginal Indian tribes, of whom there is much mention in his account of his visits to the Maine Woods; and he often records in his diary the finding of arrow-heads and spear-points. It is curious also to find him speaking favourably of classical learning in the chapter of Walden on Reading. Nevertheless he owned his full share of American self-assertion and pugnacity. In writing his Walden he proposes “to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,” if only to wake up his neighbours; and he does not omit to chronicle the fact that he took up his abode in the woods on Independence Day. A more provoking habit was his whim of extolling his native Concord as superior to all other localities, and of asserting that most of the phenomena observed elsewhere, even in the Arctic circle, might be found there. This, as Emerson has pointed out, was no doubt in great measure meant as a playful exaggeration, by way of indicating that there is plenty to be learnt in all places; but it was perhaps also due in some degree to that tendency to paradox in conversation which I have already mentioned. His love of liberty was at all times genuine and profound, and appeared both in his personal resistance to the demands of a corrupt government, and in the ready assistance he lent to the cause of emancipation. Yet he was no empty enthusiast for the mere name of liberty, but could well discern the true freedom from the false. The behaviour of his fellow-citizens who could restore an escaped slave to his master, at the very time when they were celebrating their national independence, strikes him as ludicrously incongruous. “Now-a-days,” he remarks—in his essay on Slavery in Massachusetts,—“men wear a fool’s-cap and call it a liberty-cap. I do not know but there are some who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could get but one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons, to celebrate their liberty.” This independence of character was maintained unbroken not only throughout all the active years of his life, but also through the long sad months of illness that preceded his death. Though suffering terribly from sleeplessness, he refused to take any opiate drug; preferring, like a true Stoic, to face the full reality of his destiny without shrinking. Wrapped in his usual reserve, he worked on unfalteringly to the last, completing in his Maine Woods the stories of his favourite Indian tribes, whose traditional characteristic of silent fortitude and passive resignation to fate he himself was then equalling.

  The earliest written of Thoreau’s books was the Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a record of a holiday-trip made in 1839 in company with his brother. The Week is prefaced by a short account of the river Concord, which may be compared with Hawthorne’s description in The Old Manse, and is divided by days into seven chapters, each full of accounts of the scenery through which the brothers passed, notes and observations on natural history, quotations from poets, and general moral reflections. Next to Walden, it seems to have become in America the best known of Thoreau’s books, and is highly praised by Ellery Channing in his life of Thoreau, though it is but a poor precursor of his great work. Those who look to the Week for anything comparable to Walden will be disappointed, the incidents recorded being of ten too trivial, the moralising tendency excessive, and the style of the writing crude and immature. There is something rather wearisome, and even pedantic (a strange fault in Thoreau), in the too numerous classical allusions and references to Homer, Sophocles, Persius, and other ancient writers, while the number of quotations from English poets is something positively overwhelming, and furnishes a notable example of that literary fault which, under the appellation of fluxe de bouche, has been so justly censured by De Quincey in the case of Hazlitt. None the less, there are some splendid passages in the book, worthy to be set beside anything that Thoreau ever wrote, especially the discourses on religion and friendship already referred to, and a critical estimate of Chaucer’s genius.

  Omitting for the present any mention of Thoreau’s shorter essays and studies, many of which were written early in his life and published in the “Dial” and other American magazines, afterwards to be reprinted under the title of Excursions, I will now speak briefly of Walden, which alone of Thoreau’s books can be said to be at all popular in this country. It has been truly remarked that Thoreau’s retirement to Walden was only one of many incidents in his life, and therefore ought not to be invested with too much significance apart from the rest. It was, however, undeniably the most characteristic and important epoch in his career; the time when his powers were in. their very prime; on the description of which he has lavished the utmost wealth of his rare and wayward genius. Walden is by far the finest of Thoreau’s books, pre-eminent alike for the supreme interest of the subject-matter and the excellence of style and expression. We here see Thoreau at his very best, revelling in the perfect freedom of a simple and healthy life, and enjoying unlimited opportunities for his favourite pursuits; his philosophical and moral teaching is here most lofty and uncompromising; his style of writing peculiarly pithy and trenchant; nowhere else do we find such felicity of illustration or so rich a vein of humour. Those critics who have accused Thoreau of a lack of humour must surely have forgotten such passages of Walden as that where, after describing the profound darkness of the woods on a starless night, he quietly re-marks, “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced;” or, again, the inimitable account of his purchase for building purposes of an Irishman’s shanty, where there were “good boards all around, and a good window, of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately;” or the picturesque description of the wretched habitation of John Field, another Irish labourer, where he saw

  Nothing perhaps in Walden is more humorous than the accounts of the visits of uninvited guests, and their entertainment by Thoreau. If one came he was heartily welcome to share the frugal meal; but if many came, nothing was said about dinner, “the waste and decay of physical life” appearing to be “miraculously retarded in such a case.” “So easy is it,” adds Thoreau, “though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.” Sometimes there would arrive more troublesome and pertinacious guests, “men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.” There are passages on every page of Walden full of this rare and subtle power, and manifesting that “concentrated and nutty” style of writing at which Thoreau confessedly aimed. Nor did he disdain an occasional play on words, seldom used without good effect, as in the case of Flint’s Pond, when he deplores the poverty of American nomenclature, which could desecrate a beautiful sheet of water with the name of some stingy farmer, some ancestral skin-flint by whom its banks had been ruthlessly laid bare; or when he records the fact that while he was building his hut at Walden, a heap of bricks often served him for a pillow, adding, “yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I remember; my stiff neck is of older date.” Occasionally, too, he loved, in the same manner as Ruskin, to analyse and dwell on some particular word; for instance, when scornfully rejecting the advice of critics to keep his style within bounds, he insists on the merits of literary extravagance. “I fear chiefly lest my expression be not extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience. Extra-vagance! It depends on how you are yarded.” Walden, like all Thoreau’s writings, has its faults. His vein of dry humour is sometimes liable to be misunderstood, and his fondness for epigram and paradox is occasionally overdone; the didactic tendency also is apt to make him too discursive, and most of the poetical quotations might well be dispensed with. But these blemishes are small in comparison with the immense merits of this book-merits which have not yet received one-thousandth part of the recognition they deserve.

  Of Thoreau’s three other books, The Maine Woods, A Yankee in Canada, and Cape Cod, it is not necessary to say much. The Maine Woods will probably be considered the most interesting, dealing as it does with the wild Indian tribes whom Thoreau loved so much, and the primitive forests, the savage desolation of which he was well fitted to appreciate and describe. There is little that is remarkable in the two other books, which are pleasant accounts of short tours made by Thoreau, and make no pretence of being important works like Walden. At the beginning of the Yankee in Canada Thoreau tells us that he is aware he has not got much to say about that country; “What I got by going to Canada was a cold.” This is a candid confession, and, if truth be told, a critical reader would not be unlikely to find much that is frigid in the Yankee in Canada, as if the author’s malady had reacted on the book.

  Next to Walden Thoreau is seen at his best in the short lectures and essays, which have been collected and reprinted under the titles of Excursions and Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers. In the Excursions there is less of the didactic and moralising vein than in most of Thoreau’s writings, and more of pure description and word-painting; the most interesting essays being those on A Winter’s Walk, Walking, and Night and Moonlight. The importance to Thoreau of his daily walk was greater than most men would be able to realize; he could not preserve his health and spirits unless he spent at least four hours a day among his favourite woods and fields and marshes; and he did not scruple to reject unwelcome offers of companionship from intrusive visitors, on the ground that there was nothing so important to him as his walk; he had no walks to throw away on company. His tendency in his saunterings was ever towards the west, the region of the wild and mysterious, in preference to the more civilized east; an instinctive feeling which has also been noticed by John Burroughs, an American Essayist in several ways akin to Thoreau. Latterly he discovered a still more novel charm in the nocturnal rambles of which he gives an account in Night and Moonlight, during the hours when “instead of the sun there are the moon and stars; instead of the wood-thrush there is the whip-poor-will; instead of butterflies in the meadows, fireflies—winged sparks of fire. Above all the wonderful trump of the bull-frog, ringing from Maine to Georgia.” The Anti-Slavery Papers are inferior to nothing that Thoreau ever wrote, Walden perhaps excepted, being written in his most telling style, terse, pointed, satirical, yet evidently inspired by the sincerest enthusiasm and devotion to a great cause. The best of all is his Plea for Captain John Brown, a splendid eulogy of a truly noble man, which was spoken in a public hall at Concord after John Brown’s arrest in 1859, at a time when such a view of the slave question was neither common nor popular. It is so fine throughout that it is difficult to single out any particular passages as specially worthy of praise, but I cannot help quoting the following:¹⁹