ut significance
that, with all his passion for out of doors, for wild life and the study
of bird and beast, he nowhere, so far as I can remember, mentions
Thoreau,[A] who is far and away our greatest nature writer. Doubtless he
may have esteemed him as a naturalist, but not as a transcendentalist or
as an impracticable faddist who refused to pay taxes because
Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law. We are told that his
fellow historian, Francis Parkman, had a contempt for philosophers like
Emerson and Thoreau and an admiration for writers such as Scott and
Cooper who depicted scenes of bold adventure. The author of "The Oregon
Trail" and the author of "African Game Trails" had a good deal in
common, especially great force of will--you see it in Parkman's jaw. He
was a physical wreck and did his work under almost impossible
conditions; while Roosevelt had built up an originally sickly
constitution into a physique of splendid vigor.

Towards the critical intellect, as towards the speculative, Roosevelt
felt an instinctive antagonism. One of his most characteristic
utterances is the address delivered at the Sorbonne, April 30, 1910,
"Citizenship in a Republic." Here, amidst a good deal of moral
commonplace--wise and sensible for the most part, but sufficiently
platitudinous--occurs a burst of angry eloquence. For he was always at
his strongest when scolding somebody. His audience included the
intellectual _elite_ of France; and he warns it against the besetting
sin of university dons and the learned and lettered class in general, a
supercilious, patronizing attitude towards the men of action who are
doing the rough work of the world. Critics are the object of his
fiercest denunciation. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, a
readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to
perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with
life's realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain
think, of superiority, but of weakness.... It is not the critic who
counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or
where the doer of deeds could have done them better.... Shame on the man
of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a
fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday
world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small
field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from
contact