Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/359

Rh be committed on the whole if we spoke French with him, and in no respect aided or abetted his attempts to speak English." Like all true humorists, especially of the last generation, Thoreau delighted in puns. Some of them were cogent, others weak. He wrote,—"I am monarch of all I survey"; and again, "I love to lie and re-ly on the earth." After his disappointing visit to a town on the Cape, he wrote,—"Ours was but half a Sandwich at most and that must have fallen on the buttered side sometime." Such bits of humor, like his poems, lose much flavor when divorced from the context,—they are wholly illustrative. Lowell, who in his later essay, denied humor to Thoreau, in the earlier review instanced "the passages of a genial humor interspersed at fit intervals."

On many of Thoreau's pages, where actual wit and humor are lacking, there exists a spiciness, an aroma, like that of his own Walden pines. He combined witty insight with somewhat of perversity and much exaggeration. The result was a trenchant piquancy. His confession was "I wish to make an extreme statement that so I may make an emphatic one." Again, in a letter to Mr. Blake, he writes,—"I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am,—that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an opportunity,—pile Pelion