cables of beach-grass, and see the light twinkling in the watchtower, and smell the seaweed about the rocks, or lose our way and hob-nob with the Indians in the thick fir-woods of Maine.

The Excursions are landscapes in miniature, embracing every feature of New England summers and winters, autumnal forest tints, wild apples, stormy shores, and winding streams, with here and there a picture of a landlord, or a beetle, or a fish, lit up with an electric ray of Platonism-interesting and unique, because they are at once accurate and ideal. Here is the spirit of the man who is playing a perpetual game of solitaire

"I can walk any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house. From many a hill I can see civilisation afar off. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics,—the most alarming of them all,-I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape."

And here of the astronomer

"It does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very important to the traveller whether the moon shines brightly or is obscured. It is not easy to realise the serene joy of all the earth when she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been abroad in moonlight nights. She seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf. The sailors say she is eating them up. She comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, displaying them in all their blackness, then suddenly casts them behind into a light concealed, and goes her way triumphant through a space of clear sky."

And here is the philosophic athlete—

"If you would get exercise go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man swinging dumb-bells for his health when those springs are bubbling in far-off pastures unsought by him. Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.""

In these and a hundred sketches, any one may recognise

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. cameos of English prose we may select the following :

Among those

"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 all. It is as if the beasts spoke," but "if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we complain of ?"

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.

66

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 countrymen. Their 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