What contemporary, if he was in the fighting period of his life, (since
Nature sets limits about her conscription for spiritual fields, as the
state does in physical warfare,) will ever forget what was somewhat
vaguely called the “Transcendental Movement” of thirty years ago?
Apparently set astirring by Carlyle’s essays on the “Signs of the
Times,” and on “History,” the final and more immediate impulse seemed to
be given by “Sartor Resartus.” At least the republication in Boston of
that wonderful Abraham à Sancta Clara sermon on Lear’s text of the
miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral
mutiny. _Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile!_ was shouted on all hands with
every variety of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable pitch,
representing the three sexes of men, women, and Lady Mary Wortley
Montagues. The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at
last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to
thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new and
fairer Creation was to be hatched in due time. _Redeunt Saturnia
regna_,--so far was certain, though in what shape, or by what methods,
was still a matter of debate. Every possible form of intellectual and
physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets, and
the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from
the tar-pot by incensed neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the
“feathered Mercury,” as defined by Webster and Worcester. Plainness of
speech was carried to a pitch that would have taken away the breath of
George Fox; and even swearing had its evangelists, who answered a simple
inquiry after their health with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation
that might have been honorably mentioned by Marlborough in general
orders. Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to
everybody-else’s business. No brain but had its private maggot, which
must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious
zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people),
professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an
assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be
substituted for buttons. Communities were established where everything
was to be common but common-sense. Men renounced their old gods, and
hesitated only whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or
Budh. Conventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose.
The belated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men, spread
like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible to all
Christian men; whether equally so to the most distant possible heathen
or not was unexperimented, though many would have subscribed liberally
that a fair trial might be made. It was the pentecost of Shinar. The day
of utterances reproduced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was
nothing so simple that uncial letters and the style of Diphilus the
Labyrinth could not turn into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out
of work added to the general misunderstanding their contribution of
broken English in every most ingenious form of fracture. All stood ready
at a moment’s notice to reform everything but themselves. The general
motto was:--
“And we’ll _talk_ with them, too,
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.”
Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a humorous lining.
We have barely hinted at the comic side of the affair, for the material
was endless. This was the whistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but
there was a very solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly
explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the generality suspected
nothing. The word “transcendental” then was the maid of all work for
those who could not think, as “Pre-Raphaelite” has been more recently
for people of the same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that there
was a much nearer metaphysical relation and a much more distant æsthetic
and literary relation between Carlyle and the Apostles of the Newness,
as they were called in New England, than has commonly been supposed.
Both represented the reaction and revolt against _Philisterei_, a
renewal of the old battle begun in modern times by Erasmus and Reuchlin,
and continued by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, by Heine
in Germany, and of which Fielding, Sterne, and Wordsworth in different
ways have been the leaders in England. It was simply a struggle for
fresh air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there was
danger that panes would be broken, though painted with images of saints
and martyrs. Light colored by these reverend effigies was none the more
respirable for being picturesque. There is only one thing better than
tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of which all
tradition takes its rise. It was this life which the reformers demanded,
with more or less clearness of consciousness and expression, life in
politics, life in literature, life in religion. Of what use to import a
gospel from Judæa, if we leave behind the soul that made it possible,
the God who keeps it forever real and present? Surely Abana and Pharpar
_are_ better than Jordan, if a living faith be mixed with those waters
and none with these.
Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual progress was dead; New
England Puritanism was in like manner dead; in other words,
Protestantism had made its fortune and no longer protested; but till
Carlyle spoke out in the Old World and Emerson in the New, no one had
dared to proclaim, _Le roi est mort: vive le roi!_ The meaning of which
proclamation was essentially this: the vital spirit has long since
departed out of this form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in
commission long enough; but meanwhile the soul of man, from which all
power emanates and to which it reverts, still survives in undiminished
royalty; God still survives, little as you gentlemen of the Commission
seem to be aware of it,--nay, may possibly outlive the whole of you,
incredible as it may appear. The truth is, that both Scotch
Presbyterianism and New England Puritanism made their new avatar in
Carlyle and Emerson, the heralds of their formal decease, and the
tendency of the one toward Authority and of the other toward
Independency might have been prophesied by whoever had studied history.
The necessity was not so much in the men as in the principles they
represented and the traditions which overruled them. The Puritanism of
the past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative
imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since
Shakespeare; but the Puritanism that cannot die, the Puritanism that
made New England what it is, and is destined to make America what it
should be, found its voice in Emerson. Though holding himself aloof from
all active partnership in movements of reform, he has been the sleeping
partner who has supplied a great part of their capital.
The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well-read critic must
feel at once; and so is that of Æschylus, so is that of Dante, so is
that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is that of nearly every
one except Shakespeare; but there is a gauge of height no less than of
breadth, of individuality as well as of comprehensiveness, and, above
all, there is the standard of genetic power, the test of the masculine
as distinguished from the receptive minds. There are staminate plants in
literature, that make no fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen,
quintessence of fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. Emerson’s
mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no man to whom our
æsthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan revolt had made us
ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically independent, but we
were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till
Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the
glories of blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can forget,
or cease to be grateful for, the mental and moral _nudge_ which he
received from the writings of his high-minded and brave-spirited
countryman. That we agree with him, or that he always agrees with
himself, is aside from the question; but that he arouses in us something
that we are the better for having awakened, whether that something be of
opposition or assent, that he speaks always to what is highest and least
selfish in us, few Americans of the generation younger than his own
would be disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any former
parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the
memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and
breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what
enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was
our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the
last public appearances of Schelling.
We said that the Transcendental Movement was the protestant spirit of
Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds
which compressed rather than expressed it. In its motives, its
preaching, and its results, it differed radically from the doctrine of
Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor gigantesque
as that of Rabelais, has grown shriller and shriller with years,
degenerating sometimes into a common scold, and emptying very unsavory
vials of wrath on the head of the sturdy British Socrates of worldly
common-sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much more exclusively to
self-culture and the independent development of the individual man. It
seemed to many almost Pythagorean in its voluntary seclusion from
commonwealth affairs. Both Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe,
but Emerson in a far truer sense; and while the one, from his bias
toward the eccentric, has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the
other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style,--exquisite
fineness of material, unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity of
fashion, the most high-bred garb of expression. Whatever may be said of
his thought, nothing can be finer than the delicious limpidness of his
phrase. If it was ever questionable whether democracy could develop a
gentleman, the problem has been affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle,
in his cynicism and his admiration of force in and for itself, has
become at last positively inhuman; Emerson, reverencing strength,
seeking the highest outcome of the individual, has found that society
and politics are also main elements in the attainment of the desired
end, and has drawn steadily manward and worldward. The two men represent
respectively those grand personifications in the drama of Æschylus, Βία
and Κράτος.
Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian
pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable; and it is something
eminently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by
Emerson, for they are strawberries from his own garden. A singular
mixture of varieties, indeed, there is;--alpine, some of them, with the
flavor of rare mountain air; others wood, tasting of sunny roadside
banks or shy openings in the forest; and not a few seedlings swollen
hugely by culture, but lacking the fine natural aroma of the more modest
kinds. Strange books these are of his, and interesting in many
ways,--instructive chiefly as showing how considerable a crop may be
raised on a comparatively narrow close of mind, and how much a man may
make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though perhaps never
truly finding it at last.
We have just been renewing our recollection of Mr. Thoreau’s writings,
and have read through his six volumes in the order of their production.
We shall try to give an adequate report of their impression upon us both
as critic and as mere reader. He seems to us to have been a man with so
high a conceit of himself that he accepted without questioning, and
insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as
virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, he finds none
of the activities which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of
him. Was he wanting in the qualities that make success, it is success
that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency and
purpose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a
selfish one, he condemns doing good as one of the weakest of
superstitions. To be of use was with him the most killing bait of the
wily tempter Uselessness. He had no faculty of generalization from
outside of himself, or at least no experience which would supply the
material of such, and he makes his own whim the law, his own range the
horizon of the universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose
satisfactions he had never had the means of testing, and we recognize
Apemantus behind the mask of Timon. He had little active imagination; of
the receptive he had much. His appreciation is of the highest quality;
his critical power, from want of continuity of mind, very limited and
inadequate. He somewhere cites a simile from Ossian, as an example of
the superiority of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the
historic evidence less convincing, the sentimental melancholy of those
poems should be conclusive of their modernness. He had no artistic power
such as controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness, but
exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs,
or (more rarely) short bits of verse for the expression of a detached
thought, sentiment, or image. His works give one the feeling of a sky
full of stars,--something impressive and exhilarating certainly,
something high overhead and freckled thickly with spots of isolated
brightness; but whether these have any mutual relation with each other,
or have any concern with our mundane matters, is for the most part
matter of conjecture,--astrology as yet, and not astronomy.
It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards became, that he was
not by nature an observer. He only saw the things he looked for, and was
less poet than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he did not
know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to Maine, he had
never seen phosphorescent wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most
country boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new
discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of blowing
pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Neither his attention nor his
genius was of the spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing. He thought
everything a discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting of
acorns and nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his character, but one
of his chief charms as a writer. Everything grows fresh under his hand.
He delved in his mind and nature; he planted them with all manner of
native and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was not merely
solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost
persuading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued everything in
proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively his own. He complains in
“Walden,” that there is no one in Concord with whom he could talk of
Oriental literature, though the man was living within two miles of his
hut who had introduced him to it. This intellectual selfishness becomes
sometimes almost painful in reading him. He lacked that generosity of
“communication” which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey tells us that
Wordsworth was impatient when any one else spoke of mountains, as if he
had a peculiar property in them. And we can readily understand why it
should be so: no one is satisfied with another’s appreciation of his
mistress. But Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking
(often we should be inclined to call it a remote one) not so much
because it was good in itself as because he wished few to share it with
him. It seems now and then as if he did not seek to lure others up
“above our lower region of turmoil,” but to leave his own name cut on
the mountain peak as the first climber. This itch of originality infects
his thought and style. To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns
commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of them.
As we walk down Park Street, our eye is caught by Dr. Windship’s
dumb-bells, one of which bears an inscription testifying that it is the
heaviest ever put up at arm’s length by any athlete; and in reading Mr.
Thoreau’s books we cannot help feeling as if he sometimes invited our
attention to a particular sophism or paradox as the biggest yet
maintained by any single writer. He seeks, at all risks, for perversity
of thought, and revives the age of _concetti_ while he fancies himself
going back to a pre-classical nature. “A day,” he says, “passed in the
society of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of
Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed
cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds.” It is not so
much the True that he loves as the Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age
shows itself in other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him by
extravagance of statement. He wishes always to trump your suit and to
_ruff_ when you least expect it. Do you love Nature because she is
beautiful? He will find a better argument in her ugliness. Are you tired
of the artificial man? He instantly dresses you up an ideal in a
Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of his
otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are common to all
woodsmen, white or red, and this simply because he has not studied the
pale-faced variety.
This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could have a
patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot escape in thought, any
more than he can in language, from the past and the present. As no one
ever invents a word, and yet language somehow grows by general
contribution and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr. Thoreau seems to
us to insist in public on going back to flint and steel, when there is a
match-box in his pocket which he knows very well how to use at a pinch.
Originality consists in power of digesting and assimilating thought, so
that they become part of our life and substance. Montaigne, for example,
is one of the most original of authors, though he helped himself to
ideas in every direction. But they turn to blood and coloring in his
style, and give a freshness of complexion that is forever charming. In
Thoreau much seems yet to be foreign and unassimilated, showing itself
in symptoms of indigestion. A preacher-up of Nature, we now and then
detect under the surly and stoic garb something of the sophist and the
sentimentalizer. We are far from implying that this was conscious on his
part. But it is much easier for a man to impose on himself when he
measures only with himself. A greater familiarity with ordinary men
would have done Thoreau good, by showing him how many fine qualities are
common to the race. The radical vice of his theory of life was, that he
confounded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. One is far
enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep himself clear of their
weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as exiled, if he refuse to
share in their strength. “Solitude,” says Cowley, “can be well fitted
and set right but upon a very few persons. They must have enough
knowledge of the world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue to
despise all vanity.” It is a morbid self-consciousness that pronounces
the world of men empty and worthless before trying it, the instinctive
evasion of one who is sensible of some innate weakness, and retorts the
accusation of it before any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind,
the world is a constant challenge of opportunity. Mr. Thoreau had not a
healthy mind, or he would not have been so fond of prescribing. His
whole life was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had a wiser
sense of what the world was worth. They ordained a severe
apprenticeship to law, and even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of
freedom and mastery over these. Seven years of service for Rachel were
to be rewarded at last with Leah. Seven other years of faithfulness with
her were to win them at last the true bride of their souls. Active Life
was with them the only path to the Contemplative.
Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry logician.
Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds thought with style when he
undertakes to speak of the latter. He was forever talking of getting
away from the world, but he must be always near enough to it, nay, to
the Concord corner of it, to feel the impression he makes there. He
verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte-Beuve, “On touche encore à son
temps et trèsfort, même quand on le repousse.” This egotism of his is a
Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the public
eye. The dignity of man is an excellent thing, but therefore to hold
one’s self too sacred and precious is the reverse of excellent. There is
something delightfully absurd in six volumes addressed to a world of
such “vulgar fellows” as Thoreau affirmed his fellow-men to be. We once
had a glimpse of a genuine solitary who spent his winters one hundred
and fifty miles beyond all human communication, and there dwelt with his
rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the shanty on Walden
Pond has something the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermitage of La
Chevrette. We do not believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism
carries one into the woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps the
narrowest provincialism is that of Self; that of Kleinwinkel is nothing
to it. The natural man, like the singing birds, comes out of the forest
as inevitably as the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To seek
to be natural implies a consciousness that forbids all naturalness
forever. It is as easy--and no easier--to be natural in a _salon_ as in
a swamp, if one do not aim at it, for what we call unnaturalness always
has its spring in a man’s thinking too much about himself. “It is
impossible,” said Turgot, “for a vulgar man to be simple.”
We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a
mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the general liver-complaint.
To a man of wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough for a
mood or a vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those who have most
loudly advertised their passion for seclusion and their intimacy with
nature, from Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal
men, misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion of
themselves by professing contempt for their kind. They make demands on
the world in advance proportioned to their inward measure of their own
merit, and are angry that the world pays only by the visible measure of
performance. It is true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect,
true of Saint Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Châteaubriand, his
grandchild, the inventor, we might almost say, of the primitive forest,
and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree from natural
decay in the windless silence of the woods. It is a very shallow view
that affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that men in
communities are just as true to the laws of their organization and
destiny; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but not the fool and
the knave; that would shun politics because of its demagogues, and snuff
up the stench of the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more
wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of her
works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with men, as Montaigne
and Shakespeare gained it, or with one’s own soul among men, as Dante,
is the most delightful, as it is the most precious, of all. In outward
nature it is still man that interests us, and we care far less for the
things seen than the way in which poetic eyes like Wordsworth’s or
Thoreau’s see them, and the reflections they cast there. To hear the
to-do that is often made over the simple fact that a man sees the image
of himself in the outward world, one is reminded of a savage when he for
the first time catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass.
“Venerable child of Nature,” we are tempted to say, “to whose science in
the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of
thine undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly
striving to climb back, the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy
country for a shilling!” If matters go on as they have done, and
everybody must needs blab of all the favors that have been done him by
roadside and river-brink and woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell were
no longer treachery, it will be a positive refreshment to meet a man who
is as superbly indifferent to Nature as she is to him. By and by we
shall have John Smith, of No.--12--12th Street, advertising that he is
not the J. S. who saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as he never saw one
in his life, would not see one if he could, and is prepared to prove an
alibi on the day in question.
Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to have been sanitary or
sweetening in its influence on Thoreau’s character. On the contrary, his
letters show him more cynical as he grew older. 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 his country
was the scene, and on which the curtain had already risen. He was
converting us back to a state of nature “so eloquently,” as Voltaire
said of Rousseau, “that he almost persuaded us to go on all fours,”
while the wiser fates were making it possible for us to walk erect for
the first time. Had he conversed more with his fellows, his sympathies
would have widened with the assurance that his peculiar genius had more
appreciation, and his writings a larger circle of readers, or at least a
warmer one, than he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony[6] to the
natural sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper, and in his
books an equally irrefragable one to the rare quality of his mind. He
was not a strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes
us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has fallen everywhere
in which he seems to come on the track of the shier sensations that
would elsewhere leave no trace. We think greater compression would have
done more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read
so much. Trifles are recorded with an over-minute punctuality and
conscientiousness of detail. He records the state of his personal
thermometer thirteen times a day. We cannot help thinking sometimes of
the man who
“Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats
To learn but catechisms and alphabets
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact,”
and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that “when the owl
would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole.” We could
readily part with some of his affectations. It was well enough for
Pythagoras to say, once for all, “When I was Euphorbus at the siege of
Troy”; not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into “When I was a
shepherd on the plains of Assyria.” A naive thing said over again is
anything but naive. But with every exception, there is no writing
comparable with Thoreau’s in kind, that is comparable with it in degree
where it is best; where it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled
roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and
smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand and
lovely in both worlds.
George Sand says neatly, that “Art is not a study of positive reality,”
(_actuality_ were the fitter word,) “but a seeking after ideal truth.”
It would be doing very inadequate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be
inferred that this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in
larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. He took
nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind a good
deal, if he record too faithfully every trip over a root, if he botanize
somewhat wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb outlooks from some
jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an illimitable ether, where
the breathing is not difficult for those who have any true touch of the
climbing spirit. His shanty-life was a mere impossibility, so far as his
own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. The tub
of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau’s experiment actually
presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically
abjured. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his
boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his
fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him
as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which
rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist
at all. _Magnis tamen excidit ausis._ His aim was a noble and a useful
one, in the direction of “plain living and high thinking.” It was a
practical sermon on Emerson’s text that “things are in the saddle and
ride mankind,” an attempt to solve Carlyle’s problem (condensed from
Johnson) of “lessening your denominator.” His whole life was a rebuke of
the waste and aimlessness of our American luxury, which is an abject
enslavement to tawdry upholstery. He had “fine translunary things” in
him. His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and
purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but to be a
master is to be a master. He had caught his English at its living
source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days; his
literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations are always
nuggets of the purest ore: there are sentences of his as perfect as
anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his
metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil; he had watched
Nature like a detective who is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it
seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own
Montaigne; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass;
compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White’s
“Selborne,” seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological journal in
an old almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not
with the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class who
are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible thought-seed like
ferns.