Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/176

150 with Emerson, whom Lowell has called "the most steadily attractive lecturer in America," with a diction like "homespun cloth-of-gold." Thoreau's voice was musical, his subject matter always unique, sometimes stultifying, but he lacked that magnetic charm of manner and the gracious conciliation which allured the audiences of Emerson, even if to many his thoughts were supra-mundane. Thoreau's recall to some places testified to a degree of success, though he wrote in extravagant self-depreciation,—"I am from time to time congratulating myself on my general want of success as a lecturer; apparent want of success, but is it not a real triumph? I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me again, so there is no danger of my repeating myself, and getting to be a barrel of sermons, which you must upset and begin with again." Like Emerson, Thoreau used the lecture as a means rather than an end and he often rebelled, as did Emerson, against the necessary interruption to his more deep and spontaneous thought. He felt "cheapened" by the trifling exactions often made by an audience,—the emphasis which they laid upon personal relations with the lecturer, their inability to understand without detailed explanations, and their total misunderstanding of his entire thought. Thoreau was so independent and sincere