and speaker, to have some measure of regard for his
public. But Thoreau was ready to travel lightly and alone. If he should
fail in the great adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own
affair. He had no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages
of his "Journal," from which--and here again he followed Emerson's
example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most loyal
admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very conditions
of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it in "Ethan Brand,"
and his quaint illustration of the folly of romantic expansion of the
self apart from the common interests of human kind is the picture of a
dog chasing its own tail. "It is time now that I begin to live," notes
Thoreau in the "Journal," and he continued to say it in a hundred
different ways until the end of all his journalizing, but he never quite
captured the fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory
has moved every reader of "Walden:" "I long ago lost a hound, a bay
horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail." Precisely what
he meant it is now impossible to say, but surely he betrays a doubt in
the ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He bends doggedly to
the trail, for Henry Thoreau is no quitter, but the trail leads nowhere,
and in the latest volumes of the "Journals" he seems to realize that he
has been pursuing a phantom. He dived fearlessly and deep into himself,
but somehow he failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all the
transcendental prophets assured him was to be had at the cost of diving.
This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came up quite
empty-handed. Far from it. The byproducts of his toil were enough to
have enriched many lesser men, and they have given Thoreau a secure
fame. From his boyhood he longed to make himself a writer, and an
admirable writer he became. "For along time," he says in "Walden," "I
was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor
has never 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 reward." Like so many solitaries, he
experienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort in composition,
and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled
from his note books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his
day, not even Lowell the
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