Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/174

 Provençal ministrelsy. I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Emerson and Thoreau worked in the same vineyard, sometimes in the same garden; and they so freely exchanged tools and horticultural ideas that one cannot always distinguish the original possessor. "I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy," said Thoreau, "but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. . . . I want the flower and the fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious." Those sentences might have been written by Emerson. But Thoreau has a nonchalant and phlegmatic swing—a better all-day gait than Emerson's. He goes nearer the ground, adheres more strictly to the homely material manner of Franklin; and he so regularly comes to his writing desk with the taste and stain of wild grapes on his lips and with spoils of his rustic truancy, that one can hardly find a complete paragraph of his that is not marked Thoreau's and "made in America:"

Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have