Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/345

Rh Thoreau could deeply sympathize with "this brave looker-on" who "never sacrificed one jot of his honest thought to art or whim, but to utter himself in the most direct and effectual way,—that is the endeavor." These two men, coeval prophets of social degeneracy, had many similitudes of temperament and thought. In the emphasis of individualism, of work, of hero-worship for the undaunted men of the past, in the expulsive comments on modern society, in the paradoxical catholicity and narrow prejudice, they suggest frequent comparison. Thoreau unconsciously dissects his own nature, when he says of Carlyle,—"Not the most free and catholic observer of men and events, for they are likely to find him preoccupied, but unexpectedly free and catholic when they fall within the focus of his lens."

One could scarcely admire Carlyle, as deeply as did Thoreau, without also accepting much of Goethe's teaching. In the portion of "Thursday," in "A Week," is a careful, appreciative study of Goethe's moral and literary significance, one of the first and best American criticisms on the great inspirer of modern literary standards. These early essays of Thoreau, many of them incorporated in part into his first book, evidence more literary insight than his later volumes reveal. As the years