such a description in terms of a burning wood-lot or a
hay-stack; it is no more like a conflagration than an apparition is
like solid flesh and blood. Its wonderful, I almost said its
spiritual, beauty, its sudden vanishings and returnings, its spectral,
evanescent character--why, it startles and awes one as if it were the
draperies around the throne of the Eternal. And then his mixed
metaphor--the Hyperborean gods turned farmers and busy at burning
brush, then a fiery worm, and then the burning wood-lots! But this is
Thoreau--inspired with the heavenly elixir one moment, and drunk with
the brew in his own cellar the next.

V

Thoreau's faults as a writer are as obvious as his merits. Emerson hit
upon one of them when he said, "The trick of his rhetoric is soon
learned; it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought,
its diametrical antagonist." He praises wild mountains and winter
forests for their domestic air, snow and ice for their warmth, and so
on. (Yet Emerson in one of his poems makes frost burn and fire
freeze.) One frequently comes upon such sentences as these: "If I were
sadder, I should be happier"; "The longer I have forgotten you, the
more I remember you." It may give a moment's pleasure when a writer
takes two opposites and rubs their ears together in that way, but one
may easily get too much of it. Words really mean nothing when used in
such a manner. When Emerson told Channing that if he (Emerson) could
write as well as he did, he would write a great deal better, one
readily sees what he means. And when Thoreau says of one of his
callers, "I like his looks and the sound of his silence," the
contradiction pleases one. But when he tells his friend that hate is
the substratum of his love for him, words seem to have lost their
meaning. Now and then he is guilty of sheer bragging, as when he says,
"I would not go around the corner to see the world blow up."

He often defies all our sense of fitness and proportion by the degree
in which he magnifies the little and belittles the big. He says of the
singing of a cricket which he heard under the border of some rock on
the hillside one mid-May day, that it "makes the finest singing of
birds outward and insignificant." "It is not so wildly melodious, but
it is wiser and more mature than that of the wood thrush." His forced
and meaningless analogies come out in such a comparison as this: "Most
poems, like the fruits, are sweetest toward the blosso