Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/16

Rh critics who have failed to apprehend the true key to his character. "I have myself walked, talked, and corresponded with him," says Colonel Wentworth Higginson, "and can testify that while tinged here and there, like most New England thinkers of his time, with the manner of Emerson, he was yet, as a companion, essentially original, wholesome, and enjoyable. Though more or less of a humorist, nursing his own whims, and capable of being tiresome when they came uppermost, he was easily led away from them to the vast domains of literature and nature, and then poured forth endless streams of the most interesting talk." As a lecturer—for lecturing was another occasional employment of this transcendental jack-of-all-trades—Thoreau is said to have been somewhat of an enigma to his audiences. It was not his purpose, as he himself tells in his essay on "Life without Principle," to deal merely in trivial and popular generalities, but rather to give utterance to his "privatest experiences," and, at the risk of wearying his listeners, to treat them to "a strong dose of himself."

The most vital of all Thoreau's convictions was his fixed, unalterable faith in individuality and self-reliance. Idealist though he was, he had a shrewd, practical cast of mind which made him keenly aware of the incongruities involved in many of the social schemes which were so abundantly put forward during the transcendentalist revival; it was not to co-operation that he looked for the regeneration of society, but to the efforts of one man—that is, of each man, developing and perfecting his own individual powers. His attitude on this point is well