He was a paradoxical philosopher. To praise Nature at the expense of civilized society, to eulogize the ‘perfection’ of the one and lament the degradation of the other, to declare solemnly that church spires deform the landscape, and that it is a mistake to do a second time what has been done once,--these declarations give a wholly incomplete but, so far as they go, not unjust idea of his manner. Taking Thoreau literally is a capital way to breed a dislike for him. Grant him his own manner of expressing his thought, make no effort to exact conformity from so wayward a genius, and at once you are, as Walt Whitman would say, ‘rapport’ with him. It is easy to exaggerate his paradoxicalness. Say to yourself as you take up the volume: ‘Now let us find out just how whimsical this fellow can be,’ and straightway he disappoints by not being whimsical at all. If Thoreau’s praise of Nature at the expense of Society seems to border on the absurd, one must bear in mind how complete and intimate was his knowledge of what he praised. His love of forest, lake, hill, and mountain, of beast and bird, was deep, passionate, unremitting. He speaks somewhere of an old man so versed in Nature’s ways that apparently ‘there were no secrets between them.’ This might have been said of Thoreau himself. He could pay lofty tributes to the ‘mystical’ quality in Nature; but he was not a mere rhapsodist, a petty village Chateaubriand; he could come straight down to tangible facts and recount every detail of the advent of spring at Walden. His power to see and his skill in describing the thing seen unite to give the very atmosphere of life in the woods. He was himself so complete an original and his literary attractiveness is such that Thoreau numbers among his best friends not only those who are nature-blind but the confirmed city-men as well, the frequenters of clubs, the lovers of pavements and crowds. That some of the most appreciative tributes to his genius should have come from these is but one paradox the more in the history of him who (at times) delighted above all else in the paradoxical. FOOTNOTES: [42] F. B. Sanborn: _The Personality of Thoreau_, p. 30. [43] Edward W. Emerson in the ‘Centenary’ Emerson, vol. x, p. 607. [44] _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, p. 59. XII _Oliver Wendell Holmes_ REFERENCES: =W. Sloane Kennedy=: _Oliver Wendell Holmes_, 1883. =J. T. Morse, Jr.=: _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes_, 1896. I HIS LIFE Holmes invented a phrase which became celebrated--‘the Brahmin caste of New England,’ that is to say, an aristocracy of culture. The inventor of the phrase belonged to the class. He was a son of the Reverend Abiel Holmes, minister of the First Church of Cambridge and author of that ‘painstaking and careful work,’ the _American Annals_.