tences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover,
there is a progression--I cannot call it a progress--in his work towards
a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the
bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
"Who would not like to write something which all can read, like
'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not
solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I
must say in passing, that it is not the right materialistic treatment
which delights the world in "Robinson," but the romantic and philosophic
interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of
delighting us when it is applied, in "Colonel Jack," to the management
of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been
influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely
similar in meaning. He began to fall more and more into a detailed
materialistic treatment; he went into the business doggedly, as one who
should make a guide-book; he not only chronicled what had been important
in his own experience, but whatever might have been important in the
experience of anybody else; not only what had affected him, but all that
he saw or heard. His ardour had grown less, or perhaps it was
inconsistent with a right materialistic treatment to display such
emotions as he felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose,
from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the saving
quality of humour. He was not one of those authors who have learned, in
his own words, "to leave out their dulness." He inflicts his full
quantity upon the reader in such books as "Cape Cod," or "The Yankee in
Canada." Of the latter he confessed that he had not managed to get much
of himself into it. Heaven knows he had not, nor yet much of Canada, we
may hope. "Nothing," he says somewhere, "can shock a brave man but
dulness." Well, there are few spots more shocking to the brave than the
pages of "The Yankee in Canada."

There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure:
the "Week," "Walden," and the collected letters. As to his poetry,
Emerson's word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily
said: "The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey." In this, as in his
prose, he relied greatly on the goodwill of the reader, and wrote
throughout in faith. It was an exercise of faith to suppose that