e point is capital, that Thoreau was once
fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the
angel, relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother
were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the
woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the
"rarefied and freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught
himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his
professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking
to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own
sorrow. But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so
cold, are seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of
interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching
insincerity of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory
of friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and
blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains. The most temperate of living
critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words,
"This seems nonsense." It not only seemed; it was so. It was a private
bravado of my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits
that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting
it down as a contribution to the theory of life. So with the more icy
parts of this philosophy of Thoreau's. He was affecting the Spartanism
he had not; and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he
deceived himself with reasons.

Thoreau's theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the
first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful
statement and a fairly just criticism in the study; of the second he
will find but a contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely
with his doctrines, in the photographer's phrase, came out. But that
large part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or
sought no formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance,
is wanting in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed. In
some ways a less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true
Thoreau still remains to be depicted.

VILLON. I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not
merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but
because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow. Others still think well of
him, and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw n