omplete citizen, arguing the case and glorifying to his neighbors the
dead hero. "It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for
in order to die you must first have lived.... I hear a good many pretend
that they are going to die.... Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They
haven't got life enough in them. They'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep
a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. Only half
a dozen or so have died since the world began." Such passages as this
reveal a very different Thoreau from the Thoreau who is supposed to have
spent his days in the company of swamp-blackbirds and woodchucks. He
had, in fact, one of the highest qualifications for human society,
an absolute honesty of mind. "We select granite," he says, "for the
underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we
do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest
primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.... In proportion as our inward
life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the postoffice.
You may depend upon it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the
greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has
not heard from himself this long time."

This hard, basic individualism was for Thoreau the foundation of all
enduring social relations, and the dullest observer of twentieth century
America can see that Thoreau's doctrine is needed as much as ever. His
sharp-edged personality provokes curiosity and pricks the reader into
dissent or emulation as the case may be, but its chief ethical value to
our generation lies in the fact that here was a Transcendentalist who
stressed, not the life of the senses, though he was well aware of their
seductiveness, but the stubborn energy of the will.

The scope of the present book prevents more than a glimpse at the other
members of the New England Transcendental group. They are a very mixed
company, noble, whimsical, queer, impossible. "The good Alcott," wrote
Carlyle, "with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn
temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return
to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a venerable Don
Quixote, whom nobody can laugh at without loving." These words paint a
whole company, as well as a single man. The good Alcott still awaits
an adequate biographer. Connecticut Yankee, peddler in the South,
school-teacher in Boston and elsewhere, he descende