hilosopher and moralist self-education is all very well. But in a
naturalist and in a writer with so much of the Vagabond about him as
Thoreau this sensitiveness about self-culture, this anxiety to eliminate
all the temperamental tares, is blameworthy.

The care he took to eliminate the lighter element in his work--the flash
of wit, the jocose aside--a care which pursued him to the last, seems to
show that he too often mistook gravity for seriousness. Like Dr. Watts'
bee (which is not Maeterlinck's) he "improved the shining hour," instead
of allowing the shining hour to carry with it its own improvement, none
the less potent for being unformulated. But beside the Emersonian
influence, there is the Puritan strain in Thoreau's nature, which must
not be overlooked. No doubt it also is partly accountable for his
literary silences and austere moods.

To revert to the Indians.

If Thoreau does not deal dramatically with his Indians, yet he had much
that is interesting and suggestive to say about them. These are some
passages from _A Week on the Concord_:--

"We talk of civilizing the Indians, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim
forest-life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is
admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with
Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our salons are
strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because
distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared
with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. .
. . We would not always be soothing and taming Nature, breaking the
horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the
buffalo. The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such as
admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a
stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a familiar. There
is something vulgar and foul in the latter's closeness to his
mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former's distance. In
civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length
and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

'Some nations yet shut in
With hills of ice.'

"There are other savager and more primeval aspects of Nature than our
poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry