hed
product.

"Let all things give way to the impulse of expression," he says, and
he assuredly practiced what he had preached.

One of his tricks of self-justification was to compare himself with
inanimate objects, which is usually as inept as to compare colors with
sounds or perfumes: "My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too
cold," he writes, "but each thing is warm enough of its kind. Is the
stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and does not
part with it during the night? Crystals, though they be of ice are not
too cold to melt.... Crystal does not complain of crystal any more
than the dove of its mate."

He strikes the same false note when, in discussing the question of
solitude at Walden he compares himself to the wild animals around him,
and to inanimate objects, and says he was no more lonely than the
loons on the pond, or than Walden itself: "I am no more lonely than a
single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel,
or a house-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill
Brook, or a weather-cock, or the North Star, or the South Wind, or an
April Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in a new house."
Did he imagine that any of these things were ever lonely? Man does get
lonely, but Mill Brook and the North Star probably do not.

If he sees anything unusual in nature, like galls on trees and plants,
he must needs draw some moral from it, usually at the expense of the
truth. For instance, he implies that the beauty of the oak galls is
something that was meant to bloom in the flower, that the galls are
the scarlet sins of the tree, the tree's Ode to Dejection, yet he
must have known that they are the work of an insect and are as healthy
a growth as is the regular leaf. The insect gives the magical touch
that transforms the leaf into a nursery for its young. Why deceive
ourselves by believing that fiction is more interesting than fact? But
Thoreau is full of this sort of thing; he must have his analogy, true
or false.

He says that when a certain philosophical neighbor came to visit him
in his hut at Walden, their discourse expanded and racked the little
house: "I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was
above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its
seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to
stop the consequent leak--but I had enough of that kind of oakum
already picked." At the b