The Last Harvest | Page 8

than Emerson ever
knew, a private view of nature, and has a fireside and campside quality
that essays fashioned for the lecture platform do not have. Emerson's
pages are more like mosaics, richly inlaid with gems of thought and
poetry and philosophy, while Thoreau's are more like a closely woven,
many-colored textile.
Thoreau's "Maine Woods" I look upon as one of the best books of the
kind in English literature. It has just the right tone and quality, like
Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast"--a tone and quality that
sometimes come to a man when he makes less effort to write than to
see and feel truly. He does not aim to exploit the woods, but to live
with them and possess himself of their spirit. The Cape Cod book also
has a similar merit; it almost leaves a taste of the salt sea spray upon
your lips. Emerson criticizes Thoreau freely, and justly, I think. As a
person he lacked sweetness and winsomeness; as a writer he was at
times given to a meaningless exaggeration.
Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of unlimited
contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned: it consists in
substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical antagonist.
He praises wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air;
snow and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for their
urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. With the
constant inclination to dispraise cities and civilization, he yet can find
no way to know woods and woodmen except by paralleling them with
towns and townsmen. Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it
makes me nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.
I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, but he does not
disclose new matter. I am very familiar with all his thoughts,--they are
my own quite originally drest. But if the question be, what new ideas
has he thrown into circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he

was created to say. I said to him what I often feel, I only know three
persons who seem to me fully to see this law of reciprocity or
compensation--himself, Alcott, and myself: and 't is odd that we should
all be neighbors, for in the wide land or the wide earth I do not know
another who seems to have it as deeply and originally as these three
Gothamites.
A remark of Emerson's upon Thoreau calls up the image of John Muir
to me: "If I knew only Thoreau, I should think coöperation of good men
impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth,
for comfort, and joy?" Then, after crediting Thoreau with some
admirable gifts,--centrality, penetration, strong understanding,--he
proceeds to say, "all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me, in
every experiment, year after year, that I make to hold intercourse with
his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with, and
the time and temper wasted."
Emerson met John Muir in the Yosemite in 1871 and was evidently
impressed with him. Somewhere he gives a list of his men which
begins with Carlyle and ends with Muir. Here was another man with
more character than intellect, as Emerson said of Carlyle, and with the
flavor of the wild about him. Muir was not too compliant and
deferential. He belonged to the sayers of No. Contradiction was the
breath of his nostrils. He had the Scottish chariness of bestowing praise
or approval, and could surely give Emerson the sense of being met
which he demanded. Writing was irksome to Muir as it was to Carlyle,
but in monologue, in an attentive company, he shone; not a great
thinker, but a mind strongly characteristic. His philosophy rarely rose
above that of the Sunday school, but his moral fiber was very strong,
and his wit ready and keen. In conversation and in daily intercourse he
was a man not easily put aside. Emerson found him deeply read in
nature lore and with some suggestion about his look and manner of the
wild and rugged solitude in which he lived so much.
Emerson was alive to everything around him; every object touched
some spring in his mind; the church spire, the shadows on the windows
at night, the little girl with her pail of whortleberries, the passing bee,

bird, butterfly, the clouds, the streams, the trees--all found his mind
open to any suggestion they might make. He is intent on the now and
the here. He listens to every newcomer with an expectant air. He is full
of the present. I once saw him at West Point during the June
examinations. How alert and eager he was! The bored and