whole of ourselves to that business. But commonly men have not
imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be
coopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading Oriental philosophers. It
is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact that you
suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving intimacy impossible.
Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love
even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of
love, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you
will pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life," why
then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even
years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourse
as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.

The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no
tincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and part
in the real deficiencies of social intercourse. He was not so much
difficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the
terms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuine
qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter
in "Walden"; but he would not consent, in his own words, to "feebly
tabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed to him, I think,
that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes
place on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties would
warrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man is
of greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as the
French say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not
enough of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into a
parlour and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that
dreary port; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved
books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his
fellow-creatures,--a melancholy, lean degeneration of the human
character.

"As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums up: "Any
comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the base
of the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you
will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. Will you go
to glory with me? is the burden of the song. It is not that we love to
be alone, but that we love to so