eginning of the paragraph he says that he and
his philosopher sat down each with "some shingles of thoughts well
dried," which they whittled, trying their knives and admiring the
clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. In a twinkling the three
shingles of thought are transformed into fishes of thought in a stream
into which the hermit and the philosopher gently and reverently wade,
without scaring or disturbing them. Then, presto! the fish become a
force, like the pressure of a tornado that nearly wrecks his cabin!
Surely this is tipsy rhetoric, and the work that can stand much of
it, as "Walden" does, has a plus vitality that is rarely equaled.

VI

In "Walden" Thoreau, in playfully naming his various occupations,
says, "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of
my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my
labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own
reward." If he were to come back now, he would, I think, open his eyes
in astonishment, perhaps with irritation, to see the whole bulk of
them at last in print.

His Journal was the repository of all his writings, and was drawn upon
during his lifetime for all the material he printed in books and
contributed to the magazines. The fourteen volumes, I venture to say,
form a record of the most minute and painstaking details of what one
man saw and heard on his walks in field and wood, in a single
township, that can be found in any literature.

It seems as though a man who keeps a Journal soon becomes its victim;
at least that seems to have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for
that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it was like a hungry,
omnivorous monster that constantly called for more. He transcribed to
its pages from the books he read, he filled it with interminable
accounts of the commonplace things he saw in his walks, tedious and
minute descriptions of everything in wood, field, and swamp. There are
whole pages of the Latin names of the common weeds and flowers. Often
he could not wait till he got home to write out his notes. He walked
by day and night, in cold and heat, in storm and sunshine, all for his
Journal. All was fish that came to that net; nothing was too
insignificant to go in. He did not stop to make literature of it, or
did not try, and it is rarely the raw material of literature. Its
human interest is slig