FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91  
92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   >>   >|  
"last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest. He had some acquaintance with several modern languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical essays in the "Dial," his letters and the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand manuscript pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous measurements of river currents, in his notes upon the annual flowering of plants and the migration of birds. The more thoroughly trained naturalists of our own day detect him now and again in error as to his birds and plants, just as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for him unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was not impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more fun out of his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever stimulated as many men and women in the happy use of their eyes? He would have had slight patience with much of the sentimental nature study of our generation, and certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read and write about the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish, wolflike, but it is still communicative. Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on" again to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry. The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot. Instead of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil chaos called Civil Government," Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already thrown down the gauntlet in "Slavery in Massachusetts," which Garrison had published in the "Liberator" in 1854. And now the death upon the scaffold of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a c
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91  
92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

Thoreau

 

plants

 

American

 

history

 

nature

 
signed
 

delight

 

Liberator

 

elemental

 
published

escape

 
Massachusetts
 

infection

 

reader

 

Garrison

 

contempt

 

freedom

 

intellectual

 

Ossawatomie

 

changed


stimulated

 

generation

 

scaffold

 

fanatic

 

slight

 

patience

 

sentimental

 

Slavery

 

gauntlet

 

Harper


French

 
Scotch
 

Freedom

 

represented

 

furtive

 
uncivil
 

disgust

 

called

 

renouncing

 

Instead


hermit

 

suddenly

 

selfish

 

wolflike

 

aspect

 

Government

 
thrown
 

communicative

 

challenged

 

Indeed