Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/361

Rh Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on the earth. The last two or three years I lived in Concord woods alone, something more than a mile from any neighbor, in a house built entirely by myself.

"P. S.—I beg that the class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary assistance and will make their case known to me, I will engage to give them some advice of more worth than money."

Paradox became a favorite rhetorical aid to achieve these trenchant expressions. "I love mankind but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind." After a rainy day they "managed to keep their thoughts dry and only the clothes were wet." This tendency to exaggeration produced not alone an incisive humor, but also a strange vehemence akin to that of Carlyle and Ruskin. In his plea for John Brown, he arraigns the people with a violent comparison,—"You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the Saviour of four millions of men." With fearless vigor and a wit which had truly become acrid, he attacks the modern lethargic Christian, whose prayers begin with