ist, it is an act of justice.

The public, being always eager for the details of personal life, and
therefore especially hungry for private letters, will hardly make this
distinction. All is held to be right which gives us more personality in
print. One can fancy the exasperation of a gossip, however, on opening
these profound and philosophic leaves. There is almost no private
history in them; and even of Thoreau's beloved science of Natural
History, very little. He does, indeed, begin one letter with "Dear
Mother, ... Pray have you the seventeen-year locust in Concord?" which
recalls Mendelssohn's birthday letter to his mother, opening with two
bars of music. But even such mundane matters as these occur rarely in
the book, which is chiefly made up of pure thought, and that of the
highest and often of the most subtile quality.

Thoreau had, in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if
sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in
higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson
could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity
and sometimes a certain artistic monotony to the works of our great
essayist. Emerson never wilfully leaves a point unguarded, never allows
himself to be caught in undress. Thoreau spurns this punctiliousness,
and thus impairs his average execution; while for the same reason he
attains, in favored moments, a diction more flowing and a more lyric
strain than his teacher ever allows himself, at least in prose. He also
secures, through this daring, the occasional expression of more delicate
as well as more fantastic thoughts. And there is an interesting passage
in these letters where he rather unexpectedly recognizes the dignity of
literary art as art, and states very finely its range of power. "To look
at literature,--how many fine thoughts has every man had! how few fine
thoughts are expressed! Yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and
ethereal, but that _talent merely_, with more resolution and faithful
persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in
distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the
solidest facts that we know." The Italics are his own, and the glimpse
at his literary method is very valuable.

One sees also, in these letters, how innate in him was that grand
simplicity of spiritual attitude, compared with which most confessions
of faith seem to show something hackne