, they have--even some of the second-rate papers in the "Dial"
have--now nearly fifty years since I read them first, that freshness
which is the mark of immortality.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn:
My oldest force is good as new;
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

I think I do not mistake, and confer upon them the youth which was then
mine. No, the morning light had touched their foreheads: the
youthfulness was in _them_.

Lately I saw a newspaper item about one of the thirty thousand literary
pilgrims who are said to visit Concord annually. Calling upon Mr.
Sanborn, he asked him which of the Concord authors he thought would last
longest. The answer, somewhat to his surprise, was "Thoreau." I do not
know whether this report is authentic; but supposing it true, it is not
inexplicable. I will confess that, of recent years, I find myself
reading Thoreau more and Emerson less. "Walden" seems to me more of a
book than Emerson ever wrote. Emerson's was incomparably the larger
nature, the more liberal and gracious soul. His, too, was the seminal
mind; though Lowell was unfair to the disciple, when he described him as
a pistillate blossom fertilized by the Emersonian pollen. For Thoreau
had an originality of his own--a flavor as individual as the tang of the
bog cranberry, or the wild apples which he loved. One secure advantage
he possesses in the concreteness of his subject-matter. The master, with
his abstract habit of mind and his view of the merely phenomenal
character of the objects of sense, took up a somewhat incurious attitude
towards details, not thinking it worth while to "examine too
microscopically the universal tablet." The disciple, though he professed
that the other world was all his art, had a sharp eye for this. Emerson
was Nature's lover, but Thoreau was her scholar. Emerson's method was
intuition, while Thoreau's was observation. He worked harder than
Emerson and knew more,--that is, within certain defined limits. Thus he
read the Greek poets in the original. Emerson, in whom there was a
spice of indolence--due, say his biographers, to feeble health in early
life, and the need of going slow,--read them in translations and excused
himself on the ground that he liked to be beholden to the great English
language.

Compare Hawthorne's description, in the "Mosses," of a day spent on the
Assabeth with Ellery Channing, with any chapter in Thor