"'Mais, commandant,' said the Russian lady, 'ce n'est pas l'anglais du tout ce que vous venez de dire là.'
"'Ah, oui, madame, ça vient de votre Longfellow.'
"None of the other passengers contributed, but already six nationalities had spoken—Scotch, Russian, Greek, French, English, and American. As we arose from the table and went up on deck to watch the lights glimmering in Napoleon's birthplace, Ajaccio, the Russian lady said: 'Do you suppose there is any other poet of any country, living or dead, from whom so many of us could have quoted? Not one. Not even Shakspere or Victor Hugo or Homer.'"
LVIII[ToC]
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
During his lifetime Thoreau published but two books,—Walden, and the Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,—and these had but limited sale while the author was living. Over seven hundred copies of the Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers were returned, to Thoreau by his publisher. Thoreau must have had a helpful sense of humor, for after lugging the burden upstairs he complacently remarks,—"I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." In recent times a costly edition of all Thoreau's writings has been published. He is one of the rare spirits whose fame increases with the years. But of all his voluminous writings Walden, so it seems to me, is the most readable, the freshest, the most stimulating. Higginson says that it is, perhaps, the only book yet written in America that can bear an annual reading.
Walden is a record of Thoreau's sojourn for about two years in the woods by Walden Pond. He went about two miles from his mother's door, built a little house or hut, and there lived, reading his favorite books, philosophizing, studying nature, and to a great extent avoiding society. Some people have condemned him as selfish, others have defended him. His best defense is his work. If anything so fresh and readable as Walden be the result, we might be willing to deny ourselves the society of some of our urban friends, without charging them with selfishness. Thoreau is sometimes called a "wild man"; in a sense, he is untamed. He himself confessed,—"There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness." Yet he was a true lover of men. He hated slavery and went to jail rather than pay his taxes, because he disbelieved in supporting a government that upheld slavery. When his friend, the philosophic Emerson, peered into the prison cell and said,—"Henry, why are you here?" the quick retort was,—"Why are you not here?"