Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/21

 Rh For this purpose I have chosen many letters and mere notes, illustrating his domestic and gossipy moods, for that element was in his mixed nature, inherited from the lively maternal side, and even the colloquial vulgarity (using the word in its strict sense of &quot;popular speech&quot;) that he sometimes allowed himself. In his last years he revolted a little at this turn of his thoughts, and, as Channing relates, &quot;rubbed out the more humorous parts of his essays, originally a relief to their sterner features, saying, 'I cannot bear the levity I find; to which Channing replied that he ought to spare it, even to the puns, in which he abounded almost as much as Shakespeare. His friend was right,—the obvious incongruity was as natural to Thoreau as the grace and French elegance of his best sentences. Thus I have not rejected the common and trivial in these letters; being well assured that what the increasing number of Thoreau's readers desire is to see this piquant original just as he was,—not arrayed in the paradoxical cloak of the Stoic sage, nor sitting complacent in the cynic earthenware cave of Diogenes, and bidding Alexander stand out of his sunshine.