Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/50

32 intentional. He has been called a Cagliostro, a Diogenes, a Simeon Stylites; he has been caricatured as another Yankee Barnum with a show of personal oddities for cheap effect. His occasional acts have been widely exploited, while his basal traits have been ignored. Few men of letters have had so many interpreters and critics; few have suffered so much distortion.

Alcott, who loved Thoreau with gentle trust and who recognized his qualities with keener insight than was his wont, happily united the words, "sylvan and human," in his brief analysis of his friend's nature. Thoreau's traits readily yield themselves to paradox. A primal delight in wild, rank nature was combined with a rare fineness of sense and intellect. A stoical self-control and complacency coexisted with a supersensitive and tender heart towards all forms of life. A keen inventive and manual skill, with much practical sagacity, was directed by a brain which daily speculated upon problems of Attic philosophy and Transcendentalism. He was at the same time conservative and radical, self-reliant and self-depreciative, industrious and leisurely. The development and expression of this complex personality afford many seeming contradictions which, in the end, become consistences.