Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/298

284 which at length might become music in a divine hand.

Heard C. lecture to-night. It was a bushel of nuts, perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard; ever so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that you could not look at him, and take his thought at the same time. You had to give your undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech intervening. There was no sloping up or down to or from his points. It was all genius, no talent. It required more close attention, more abstraction from surrounding circumstances than any lecture I have heard, for well as I know C., he more than any man disappoints my expectation. When I meet him in the dark, hear him, I cannot realize that I ever saw him before. He will be strange, unexpected to his best acquaintance. I cannot associate the lecturer with the companion of my walks. The lecture was from so original and peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main, that I doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe of what he said. It was so hard to hear that doubtless few made the exertion, a thick succession of mountain passes, and no intermediate slopes and plains. Other lectures, even the best, in which so much space is given to the elaborate development of a few