A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.Thoreau, Henry David
History
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.
Thoreau, Henry David
Brown, John, 1800-1859; Québec (Province) -- Description and travel; Slavery -- United States
Many have tasted of this well with an odd suspicion, as if it were some
fountain Arethuse which had flowed under the sea from Germany, as if the
materials of his books had lain in some garret there, in danger of being
appropriated for waste-paper. Over what German ocean, from what
Hercynian forest, he has been imported, piecemeal, into England, or
whether he has now all arrived, we are not informed. This article is not
invoiced in Hamburg nor in London. Perhaps it was contraband. However,
we suspect that this sort of goods cannot be imported in this way. No
matter how skilful the stevedore, all things being got into sailing
trim, wait for a Sunday, and aft wind, and then weigh anchor, and run up
the main-sheet,—straightway what of transcendent and permanent value is
there resists the aft wind, and will doggedly stay behind that
Sunday,—it does not travel Sundays; while biscuit and pork make headway,
and sailors cry heave-yo! It must part company, if it open a seam. It is
not quite safe to send out a venture in this kind, unless yourself go
supercargo. Where a man goes, there he is; but the slightest virtue is
immovable,—it is real estate, not personal; who would keep it, must
consent to be bought and sold with it.
However, we need not dwell on this charge of a German extraction, it
being generally admitted, by this time, that Carlyle is English, and an
inhabitant of London. He has the English for his mother-tongue, though
with a Scotch accent, or never so many accents, and thoughts also, which
are the legitimate growth of native soil, to utter therewith. His style
is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a
book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry,
nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation
endlessly repeated. It resounds with emphatic, natural, lively, stirring
tones, muttering, rattling, exploding, like shells and shot, and with
like execution. So far as it is a merit in composition, that the written
answer to the spoken word, and the spoken word to a fresh and pertinent
thought in the mind, as well as to the half thoughts, the tumultuary
misgivings and expectancies, this author is, perhaps, not to be matched
in literature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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