g, he must not look to have a large
library; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he
will find his work cut out for him.

Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and
composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that
"the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing." He
speaks in one place of "plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style,"
which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In another
he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it
drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must
conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase "if one has anything
to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and
without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the
work practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only out
of fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit;
and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he
had been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness,
compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till
after a busy and prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easy
writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented
with a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass
of their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but in
face of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of
_Hamlet_, this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were
unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon called a fair copy. He
who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently
and earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and in
spite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research in
one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only
by the occasional finish, but by the determined exaggeration of his
style. "I trust you realise what an exaggerator I am--that I lay myself
out to exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at the explanation:
"Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speak
extravagantly any more for ever?" And yet once more, in his essay on
Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we
think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the
time th