m end." Which
_is_ the blossom end of a poem?

Thoreau advised one of his correspondents when he made garden to plant
some Giant Regrets--they were good for sauce. It is certain that he
himself planted some Giant Exaggerations and had a good yield. His
exaggeration was deliberate. "Walden" is from first to last a most
delightful sample of his talent. He belittles everything that goes on
in the world outside his bean-field. Business, politics, institutions,
governments, wars and rumors of wars, were not so much to him as the
humming of a mosquito in his hut at Walden: "I am as much affected by
the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour
through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door
and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.
It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air,
singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical
about it." One wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly buzzing
on the pane.

He made Walden Pond famous because he made it the center of the
universe and found life rich and full without many of the things that
others deem necessary. There is a stream of pilgrims to Walden at all
seasons, curious to see where so much came out of so little--where a
man had lived who preferred poverty to riches, and solitude to
society, who boasted that he could do without the post office, the
newspapers, the telegraph, and who had little use for the railroad,
though he thought mankind had become a little more punctual since its
invention.

Another conspicuous fault as a writer is his frequent use of false
analogies, or his comparison of things which have no ground of
relationship, as when he says: "A day passed in the society of those
Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not
be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines, and the
fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." The word "wit" has no meaning when
thus used. Or again where he says: "All great enterprises are
self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his
poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it
makes." Was there ever a more inept and untruthful comparison? To find
any ground of comparison between the two things he compared, he must
make his poet sustain his body by the scraps and lines of his poem
which he rejects, or else the steam planing-mill consume its finis