The Life of Henry David Thoreau, Including Many Essays Hitherto Unpublished and Some Account of His Family and Friends (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...to the Siberian traveller, on whose morning route the sun is rising, and in imagination frequent the encampment of the lonely fur-trader on Lake Winnipeg; and climb the Ural or the Jura, or range the Andes and the Rocky Mountains, or traverse the shaggy solitudes of the glaciers, --in our dreams hugging the furs about us. Or perhaps we have visions of Greece and Italy, the Egean Sea and the Sicilian coast; or anticipate the coming in of Spring like a pomp, through the gate of a city. This passage, written about 1842, shows, as do many of his college essays, how early Thoreau possessed that grace of style, that felicity in the choice of words, for which many toil in vain. Channing, with his usual acuteness, somewhere says, "In much that Thoreau wrote there was a philological side; this needs to be thoughtfully considered." It was a natural result of his acquisition of many languages, and his notice of their relation one to another. But I have imputed this elegance to the mixture of French and Scottish blood in his ancestry; both those nations having, by long descent, graceful rhetoric without conscious art, far beyond the Anglo-Saxon, with all his vigor, imagination, and resource. Thoreau had the vigor of one line in his mixed pedigree and the grace of another. As he went on writing, --his chief business in life, --he brought this magic of style more and more into his pages; thus to equalize what had been at first (as with most young authors) an unequal and fitful manner of expressing profound thought. In his frequent verse, much of which he destroyed after Emerson's unfavorable criticism, this inequality and fitfulness was never quite overcome. Like Channing, who wrote much more verse, he did not seem capable of passing judgment on...