ome
great philosopher, greater than Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps
"from a deep principle," "simplifying life, returning to nature,"
having put off many things,--"luxuries, comforts, human society, even
his feet,--wrestling with his thoughts." He outdid himself. He
out-Thoreaued Thoreau: "Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk
he indulges, in thought, only in triumphant satires on men? [More
severe than those of the Walden hermit?] I was not sure for a moment
but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the
philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous
point of view--" with much more to the same effect.

Thoreau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and
comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and
austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this
besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to
contemplate.

One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender human emotions in
Thoreau, his stoical indifference is so habitual with him: "I laughed
at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic
story." And he excuses himself by saying, "It is not I, but Nature in
me, which was stronger than I."

It was hard for Thoreau to get interested in young women. He once went
to an evening party of thirty or forty of them, "in a small room,
warm and noisy." He was introduced to two of them, but could not hear
what they said, there was such a cackling. He concludes by saying:
"The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever
tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure
whether they are there or not."

XI

As a philosopher or expositor and interpreter of a principle, Thoreau
is often simply grotesque. His passion for strong and striking figures
usually gets the best of him. In discussing the relation that exists
between the speaker or lecturer and his audience he says, "The
lecturer will read best those parts of his lecture which are best
heard," as if the reading did not precede the hearing! Then comes this
grotesque analogy: "I saw some men unloading molasses-hogsheads from a
truck at a depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined plane. The
truckman stood behind and shoved, after putting a couple of ropes, one
round each end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the depot
steadily pulled at the ropes. The first man was the lecturer, the last
was t