orks) in the open air every season of every
year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or
church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul."

"The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other--and the
greatest poet is, of course, himself--"knows that the young man who
composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for
himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it
to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for
himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great
prudence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things,
and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely
following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward
and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any
emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death."

There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly
Christian. Any reader who bears in mind Whitman's own advice and
"dismisses whatever insults his own soul" will find plenty that is
bracing, brightening, and chastening to reward him for a little patience
at first. It seems hardly possible that any being should get evil from
so healthy a book as the "Leaves of Grass," which is simply comical
whenever it falls short of nobility; but if there be any such, who
cannot both take and leave, who cannot let a single opportunity pass by
without some unworthy and unmanly thought, I should have as great
difficulty, and neither more nor less, in recommending the works of
Whitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or letting them go abroad
outside of the grounds of a private asylum.

IV

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS

I

Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut,
conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his
almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in
act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's
heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his
enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be
convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but
was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to no
profession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he never
went to church; he never vote