animal more unreservedly than the horse,--as if this poor
sophisticated creature, though still a quadruped and a brother, had been
so vitiated by undue intimacy with man as to have become little better
than if he wore broadcloth and voted.

Yet there was not in Thoreau one trait of the misanthrope; his solitary
life at Walden was not chosen because he loved man less, but because he
loved Nature more; and any young poet or naturalist might envy the
opportunities it gave him. But his intellectual habits showed always a
tendency to exaggeration, and he spent much mental force in fighting
shadows, Church and State, war and politics,--a man of solid vigor must
find room in his philosophy to tolerate these matters for a time, even
if he cannot cordially embrace them. But Thoreau, a celibate, and at
times a hermit, brought the Protestant extreme to match the Roman
Catholic, and though he did not personally ignore one duty of domestic
life, he yet held a system which would have excluded wife and child,
house and property. His example is noble and useful to all high-minded
young people, but only when interpreted by a philosophy less exclusive
than his own. In urging his one social panacea, "Simplify, I say,
simplify," he failed to see that all steps in moral or material
organization are really efforts after the same process he recommends.
The sewing-machine is a more complex affair than the needle, but it
simplifies every woman's life, and helps her to that same comparative
freedom from care which Thoreau would seek only by reverting to the
Indian blanket.

But many-sided men do not move in battalions, and even a one-sided
philosopher may be a boon to think of, if he be as noble as Thoreau. His
very defects are higher than many men's virtues, and his most fantastic
moralizings will bear reading without doing harm, especially during a
Presidential campaign. Of his books, "Walden" will probably be
permanently reckoned as the best, as being the most full and deliberate
exhibition of the author's mind, and as extracting the most from the
least material. It is also the most uniform in texture, and the most
complete in plan, while the "Week" has no unity but that of the
chronological epoch it covers,--a week which is probably the most
comprehensive on record, ranging from the Bhagvat-Geetha to the "good
time coming,"--and the "Excursions" no unity but that of the covers
which comprise them, being, indeed, a compilation of his earlies