s good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that
I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for
that one."

This is not the language of a crank, or the words of a man who, as Lowell
unfairly said, seemed "to insist in public in going back to flint and
steel when there is a match-box in his pocket."

Lowell's criticism of Thoreau, indeed, is quite wide of the mark. It
assumes throughout that Thoreau aimed at "an entire independence of
mankind," when Thoreau himself repeatedly says that he aimed at nothing
of the sort. He made an experiment for the purpose of seeing what a
simple, frugal, open-air life would do for him. The experiment being
made, he returned quietly to the conditions of ordinary life. But he did
not lack self-assurance, and his frank satisfaction with the results of
his experiment was not altogether pleasing to those who had scant
sympathy with his passion for the Earth.

To be quite fair to Lowell and other hostile critics one must admit that,
genuine as Thoreau was, he had the habit common to all self-contained and
self-opiniated men of talking at times as though his very idiosyncrasies
were rules of conduct imperative upon others. His theory of life was
sound enough, his demand for simple modes of living, for a closer
communion with Nature, for a more sympathetic understanding of the "brute
creation," were reasonable beyond question. But the Emersonian mannerism
(which gives an appearance of dogmatism, when no dogmatism is intended)
starts up from time to time and gives the reader the impression that the
path to salvation traverses Walden, all other paths being negligible, and
that you cannot attain perfection unless you keep a pet squirrel.

But if a sentence here and there has an annoying flavour of complacent
dogmatism, and if the note of self-assertion grows too loud on occasion
for our sensitive ears, {102} yet his life and writings considered as a
whole do not assuredly favour verdicts so unfavourable as those of Lowell
and Stevenson.

Swagger and exaggeration may be irritating, but after all the important
thing is whether a man has anything to swagger about, whether the case
which he exaggerates is at heart sane and just.

Every Vagabond swaggers because he is an egotist more or less, and
relishes keenly the life he has mapped out for himself. But the swagger
is of the harmless kind; it is not really offensive; it is a sort of
childish exuberan