Page:A Bit of Unpublished Correspondence Between Henry D. Thoreau and Isaac T. Hecker.djvu/11

 lineaments were the same in both, with only this difference, that Thoreau's personal pronoun was I, and Hecker's was It.

The late Professor Clifford was wont to maintain that there is a special theological faculty or insight, analogous to the scientific, poetic, and artistic faculty; and that the persons in whom this genius is exceptionally developed are the founders of religions and religious orders. It is apparent that Isaac Hecker's nature from his youth partook largely of this quality. He early showed an affinity with the supersensible and the supernatural, was easily "possessed," his mind on that side being primitive and credulous to a degree. Such logic as he had—and his writings are full of it—was the logic of instinct and feeling, not of fact. To him, possibilities, if conceivable and desirable, easily became probabilities, and probabilities certainties. With this temperament, which Curtis mildly characterizes as "sanguine," it is not difficult to understand why the paramount purpose of his life should have been to establish in this country a propaganda of such persuasive power as to sweep the American people en masse into the Catholic Church, and it was upon this object that all his energies and hopes were centered in a burning focus of endeavor. The genius of Thoreau moved in a totally different plane. He was preëminently of this world, both in its actual and ideal aspects, and he found it so rich and satisfying to his whole nature that he yearned for no other. Channing aptly names him "poet-naturalist," for he united in harmonious combination accurate perception of external facts and relations, with an imaginative insight and sympathy that easily and habitually transcended the scope of mere science and ratiocination. He possessed not only feet, but wings, and was equally at home on the solid ground of natural law and in the airy spaces of fancy. Time, which he said was the stream he went a-fishing in, time and the world about him,—these were the adapted and sufficient