The Last Harvest | Page 3

are of secondary importance. You
could not make another "Walden" out of Thoreau's Journals, nor build
up another chapter on "Self-Reliance," or on "Character," or on the
"Over-Soul," from Emerson's, though there are fragments here and
there in both that are on a level with their best work.
Emerson records in 1835 that his brother Charles wondered that he did
not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate
habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles evidently
was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly more fond of
real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an orator and could
not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write Journals, as I have
said, are usually men of solitary habits, and their Journal largely takes
the place of social converse. Amiel, Emerson, and Thoreau were lonely
souls, lacking in social gifts, and seeking relief in the society of their
own thoughts. Such men go to their Journals as other men go to their
clubs. They love to be alone with themselves, and dread to be
benumbed or drained of their mental force by uncongenial persons. To
such a man his Journal becomes his duplicate self and he says to it what
he could not say to his nearest friend. It becomes both an altar and a
confessional. Especially is this true of deeply religious souls such as the
men I have named. They commune, through their Journals, with the
demons that attend them. Amiel begins his Journal with the sentence,
"There is but one thing needful--to possess God," and Emerson's
Journal in its most characteristic pages is always a search after God, or
the highest truth.
"After a day of humiliation and stripes," he writes, "if I can write it
down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of joy,
the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given me by
all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of humility or
hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end." "I write my
journal, I deliver my lecture with joy," but "at the name of society all
my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen."

He clearly had no genius for social intercourse. At the age of thirty he
said he had "no skill to live with men; that is, such men as the world is
made of; and such as I delight in I seldom find." Again he says, aged
thirty-two, "I study the art of solitude; I yield me as gracefully as I can
to destiny," and adds that it is "from eternity a settled thing" that he and
society shall be "nothing to each other." He takes to his Journal instead.
It is his house of refuge.
Yet he constantly laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the
poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and of
sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal
spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for
many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run
for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But he does
not run away; he often takes it out in hoeing in his garden: "My good
hoe as it bites the ground revenges my wrongs, and I have less lust to
bite my enemies." "In smoothing the rough hillocks I smooth my
temper. In a short time I can hear the bobolinks sing and see the blessed
deluge of light and color that rolls around me." Somewhere he has said
that the writer should not dig, and yet again and again we find him
resorting to hoe or spade to help him sleep, as well as to smooth his
temper: "Yesterday afternoon, I stirred the earth about my shrubs and
trees and quarrelled with the pipergrass, and now I have slept, and no
longer am morose nor feel twitchings in the muscles of my face when a
visitor is by." We welcome these and many another bit of self-analysis:
"I was born with a seeing eye and not a helping hand. I can only
comfort my friends by thought, and not by love or aid." "I was made a
hermit and am content with my lot. I pluck golden fruit from rare
meetings with wise men." Margaret Fuller told him he seemed always
on stilts: "It is even so. Most of the persons whom I see in my own
house I see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they come to me.
Nothing can exceed the frigidity and labor of my