paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper
wasted." "It is curious," he again says, "that Thoreau goes to a house
to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers
it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any
of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it,
and when he has finished his report departs with precipitation."

It is interesting in this connection to put along-side of these rather
caustic criticisms a remark in kind recorded by Thoreau in his Journal
concerning Emerson: "Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my
time--nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where
there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind--told me what I
knew--and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to
oppose him."

Evidently Concord philosophers were not always in concord.

More characteristic of Emerson is the incident Thoreau relates of his
driving his own calf, which had just come in with the cows, out of the
yard, thinking it belonged to a drove that was then going by. From all
accounts Emerson was as slow to recognize his own thoughts when Alcott
and Channing aired them before him as he was to recognize his own
calf.

"I have got a load of great hardwood stumps," writes Thoreau, and
then, as though following out a thought suggested by them, he adds:
"For sympathy with my neighbors I might about as well live in China.
They are to me barbarians with their committee works and
gregariousness."

Probably the stumps were from trees that grew on his neighbors' farms
and were a gift to him. Let us hope the farmers did not deliver them
to him free of charge. He complained that the thousand and one
gentlemen that he met were all alike; he was not cheered by the hope
of any rudeness from them: "A cross man, a coarse man, an eccentric
man, a silent man who does not drill well--of him there is some hope,"
he declares. Herein we get a glimpse of the Thoreau ideal which led
his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked the human sentiment. He
may or may not have been a "cross man," but he certainly did not
"drill well," for which his readers have reason to be thankful.
Although Thoreau upholds the cross and the coarse man, one would
really like to know with what grace he would have put up with
gratuitous discourtesy or insult. I remember an entry in his Journal
in which he tells of feeling a little cheapened when a neig