re are no
such resources. It is a wickedness to dream of them. Man has no root but
in tradition and custom, no blessing but in serving them."

As that assurance is taken, and as that spirit prevails, man forfeits
his manhood. His life becomes mechanical. Ideas disappear in the forms
that once embodied them; imagination is buried beneath symbol; belief
dies of creed, and morality of custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide
pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting,
and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is
properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction,
filling all the air with the breath of their foulness.

The earlier part of the eighteenth century found all Europe in this
stage. Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let
him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery.
Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh--with a screaming wail inside
it, if one can hear well--rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up,
toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true;
then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.

Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of
reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few
noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life.
"Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let
us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,--momentarily
created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."

The noblest type I have ever known of this _extra-vagance_, this
wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity,
as of a newborn babe,--with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my
observation,--with his indomitable persistency,--by the aid also of that
all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his
priceless gift,--he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an
indescribable charm. In him it came at once to beauty and to
consecration.

Yet even he must leave out marriage, to make his scheme of life
practicable. He must ignore Nature's demand that humanity continue, or
recognize it only with loathing. "Marriage is that!" said he to a
friend,--and held up a carrion-flower.

Moreover, the success of his life--nay, the very quality of his
being--implied New England and its civilization. To suppose him born
among the