Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/339

Rh were written in an accountant's ledger of small size. One of Thoreau's direct complaints against the growing commercialism of his age was that he could not buy proper blank-books, in which to record his thoughts and relations with nature, without finding within them the inevitable and mercantile red-lines for dollars and cents.

These journals, as innately regarded, are most remarkable for their mingled sameness and variety; serene sameness of general theme but unending variety of expression and image. Nature, friendship, books, morality, justice,—such are the reiterated subjects. Are they not the universal concepts of a higher range of thought and life? In all the records there is a vital, intense touch, or a unique illustration with potent force, which seem to reveal the man behind the pen, however abstruse and chimerical may be the idea. He wrote,—"My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for an aspect of the world, what I love to think of." It is not strange that, by this mingling of enthusiasm and worthy exclusion, these journal-pages have such perennial vitality. Their dual charm is in the philosophy mingled with nature-pictures and melodies. Such were the manifestations of the author's own duality,—"the sylvan and the human."