, but all men
ultimately love her lovers. And of those lovers, past or present,
Thoreau is the most profound in his devotion, and the most richly
repaid.

Against these great merits are to be set, no doubt, some formidable
literary defects: an occasional mistiness of expression, like the summit
of Katahdin, as he himself describes it,--one vast fog, with here and
there a rock protruding; also, an occasional sandy barrenness, like his
beloved Cape Cod. In truth, he never quite completed the transition from
the observer to the artist. With the power of constructing sentences as
perfectly graceful as a hemlock-bough, he yet displays the most wayward
aptitude for literary caterpillars'-nests and all manner of
disfigurements. The same want of artistic habit appears also in his
wilful disregard of all rules of proportion. He depicts an Indian, for
instance, with such minute observation and admirable verbal skill that
one feels as if neither Catlin nor Schoolcraft ever saw the actual
creature; but though the table-talk of the aboriginal may seem for a
time more suggestive than that of Coleridge or Macaulay, yet there is a
point beyond which his, like theirs, becomes a bore.

In addition to these drawbacks, one finds in Thoreau an unnecessary
defiance of tone, and a very resolute non-appreciation of many things
which a larger mental digestion can assimilate without discomfort. In
his dealings with Nature he is sweet, genial, patient, wise. In his
dealings with men he exasperates himself over the least divergence from
the desired type. Before any over-tendency to the amenities and luxuries
of civilization, in particular, he becomes unreasonable and relentless.
Hence there appears something hard and ungenial in his views of life,
utterly out of keeping with the delicate tenderness which he shows in
the woods. The housekeeping of bees and birds he finds noble and
beautiful, but for the home and cradle of the humblest human pair he can
scarcely be said to have even toleration; a farmer's barn he considers a
cumbrous and pitiable appendage, and he lectures the Irish women in
their shanties for their undue share of the elegancies of life. With
infinite faith in the tendencies of mineral and vegetable nature, in
human nature he shows no practical trust, and must even be severe upon
the babies in the Maine log-huts for playing with wooden dolls instead
of pine-cones. It is, indeed, noticeable that he seems to love every
other living