Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/337

Rh and there are diaries. The latter are the common form,—mere chronology of daily experiences. In the last generation they usually began in almanac style with a record of the weather, probably a legacy from "Poor Richard" and his companions. Even these trivial and laconic diaries are superseded to-day by the tyrannous "engagement book." Thoreau's journals, from the inception of the idea, belonged to the loftier literary form, like the soul-records of Saint Augustine, Montaigne, Amiel, or Thomas à Kempis, or the "Table-Talk" of Luther and Coleridge. To him the journal became "a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done and said." His thoughts and inner experiences, emotions, moods and aspirations, were jotted down that later they might be united into a literary frame-work.

In the same college essay, in which he advocates the maintenance of a journal, he expands this idea somewhat by describing the view from his "little Gothic window," and his reveries on the quiet Sunday afternoon. In a fragmentary way he began the next year, 1835, to record occasional thoughts and observations. According to his own statement, "the big red journal" of 596 pages, was begun in October, 1837, and ended June, 1840. To it succeeded the thirty-five smaller volumes, ripe with