However, a fair estimate of Thoreau and his case against the world should steer the wise course between taking him too seriously and literally and not taking him seriously at all, between Stevenson's scathing attack in "Familiar Portraits" and Holmes's supercilious "Contentment." If one elects to act as a prosecuting attorney, one can say of him what Thoreau quotes a friend as saying of Carlyle, that he "is so ready to obey his humour that he makes the least vestige of truth the foundation of any superstructure, not keeping faith with his better genius nor truest readers." But if one choose to value him as a friend might, one can exonerate him in the light of a warning and a confession of his own: "I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am,--that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an opportunity,--pile Pelion upon Ossa, to reach heaven so." This is the very point of his title-page inscription to "Walden": "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." It is easy to compare Emerson and Thoreau to the disadvantage of the younger man. But at one point they were quite alike, and that is in the fact that both were more social in their lives than in their writings. Thoreau was not an unmitigated anarchist, or hermit, or loafer. He was more capable and industrious than he admits; he was devoted to his family and a loyal friend. In his protest at the ways of the world he was, in a manner, "whistling to keep his courage up," and often his whistling became rather shrill. The greater part of "Walden" and, indeed, of his writing as a whole is the work of a naturalist--the work included in such chapters as "Sounds," "The Ponds," "Brute Neighbors," "Former Inhabitants," and "Winter Visitors," "Winter Animals," and "The Pond in Winter." In the two generations since Crèvecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer" no one on this side the Atlantic had written about the out of doors with such fullness and intimate knowledge. In this respect, moreover, Thoreau, instead of being a student or imitator of Emerson, was his guide and instructor. Although modern science owes little to him and has corrected many of his findings, it recalls his help to Agassiz in collecting specimens; and modern literature has produced only one or two men, like John Burroughs and John Muir, who write of nature with the same sympathy and beauty. The title of his friend Channing's book "Thoreau: the Poet-Naturalist" tells the whole story. He was fascinated by growing things. He could not learn enough about their ways. The life in Concord's rivers, ponds, fields, and woods by day and night and during the changing seasons was an endless study and pleasure. In his journal he kept a detailed record of the pageant of the year, which after his death was assembled in the four volumes "Spring in Massachusetts," "Summer," "Autumn," and "Winter."