know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewhere
he returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: "If I ever
_did_ a man any good in their sense, of course it was something
exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil I am
constantly doing by being what I am."

There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in this
unshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the wants, thoughts,
or sufferings of others. In his whole works I find no trace of pity.
This was partly the result of theory, for he held the world too
mysterious to be criticised, and asks conclusively: "What right have I
to grieve who have not ceased to wonder?" But it sprang still more from
constitutional indifference and superiority; and he grew up healthy,
composed, and unconscious from among life's horrors, like a green
bay-tree from a field of battle. It was from this lack in himself that
he failed to do justice to the spirit of Christ; for while he could
glean more meaning from individual precepts than any score of
Christians, yet he conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed
it with such contrary emotions, that the sense and purport of the
doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him unimpressed.
He could understand the idealism of the Christian view, but he was
himself so unaffectedly unhuman that he did not recognise the human
intention and essence of that teaching. Hence he complained that Christ
did not leave us a rule that was proper and sufficient for this world,
not having conceived the nature of the rule that was laid down; for
things of that character that are sufficiently unacceptable become
positively non-existent to the mind. But perhaps we shall best
appreciate the defect in Thoreau by seeing it supplied in the case of
Whitman. For the one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the other; it
is what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously bawls; it
is the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference! the same
argument, but used to what a new conclusion! Thoreau had plenty of
humour until he tutored himself out of it, and so forfeited that best
birthright of a sensible man; Whitman, in that respect, seems to have
been sent into the world naked and unashamed; and yet by a strange
consummation, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, and
claustral. Of these two philosophies, so nearly identical at bottom, the
one pursues