<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII.</SPAN><br/><br/> POET, MORALIST, AND PHILOSOPHER.</h2>
<p>The character of poet is so high and so
rare, in any modern civilization, and specially
in our American career of nationality,
that it behooves us to mark and claim all
our true poets, before they are classified
under some other name,—as philosophers,
naturalists, romancers, or historians. Thus
Emerson is primarily and chiefly a poet,
and only a philosopher in his second intention;
and thus also Thoreau, though a naturalist
by habit, and a moralist by constitution,
was inwardly a poet by force of
that shaping and controlling imagination,
which was his strongest faculty. His mind
tended naturally to the ideal side. He
would have been an idealist in any circumstances;
a fluent and glowing poet, had he
been born among a people to whom poesy
is native, like the Greeks, the Italians, the
Irish. As it was, his poetic light illumined<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</SPAN></span>
every wide prospect and every narrow
cranny in which his active, patient spirit
pursued its task. It was this inward illumination
as well as the star-like beam of
Emerson's genius in "Nature," which caused
Thoreau to write in his senior year at college,
"This curious world which we inhabit
is more wonderful than it is convenient;
more beautiful than it is useful," and he
cherished this belief through life. In youth,
too, he said, "The other world is all my
art, my pencils will draw no other, my jack-knife
will cut nothing else; I do not use it
as a means." It was in this spirit that he
afterwards uttered the quaint parable, which
was his version of the primitive legend of
the Golden Age:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a
turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many
are the travelers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks and what calls they answered
to. I have met one or two who had
heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and
even seen the dove disappear behind the cloud;
and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if
they had lost them themselves."</p>
</div>
<p>In the same significance read his little-known
verses, "The Pilgrims."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"When I have slumbered<br/></span>
<span class="i2">I have heard sounds<br/></span>
<span class="i0">As of travelers passing<br/></span>
<span class="i2">These my grounds.<br/></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"'T was a sweet music<br/></span>
<span class="i2">Wafted them by,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">I could not tell<br/></span>
<span class="i2">If afar off or nigh.<br/></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Unless I dreamed it<br/></span>
<span class="i2">This was of yore;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">I never told it<br/></span>
<span class="i2">To mortal before.<br/></span></div>
<div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Never remembered<br/></span>
<span class="i2">But in my dreams,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">What to me waking<br/></span>
<span class="i2">A miracle seems."<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>It seems to have been the habit of Thoreau,
in writing verse, to compose a couplet,
a quatrain, or other short metrical expression,
copy it in his journal, and afterward,
when these verses had grown to a considerable
number, to arrange them in the form
of a single piece. This gives to his poems
the epigrammatic air which most of them
have. After he was thirty years old, he
wrote scarcely any verse, and he even destroyed
much that he had previously written,
following in this the judgment of Mr.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</SPAN></span>
Emerson, rather than his own, as he told
me one day during his last illness. He had
read all that was best in English and in
Greek poetry, but was more familiar with
the English poets of Milton's time and earlier,
than with those more recent, except
his own townsmen and companions. He
valued Milton above Shakespeare, and had
a special love for Æschylus, two of whose
tragedies he translated. He had read Pindar,
Simonides, and the Greek Anthology,
and wrote, at his best, as well as the finest
of the Greek lyric poets. Even Emerson,
who was a severe critic of his verses, says,
"His classic poem on 'Smoke' suggests
Simonides, but is better than any poem of
Simonides." Indeed, what Greek would
not be proud to claim this fragment as his
own?</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Light winged smoke, Icarian bird!<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,—<br/></span>
<span class="i8">. . . .<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame."<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>No complete collection of Thoreau's poems
has ever been made. Amid much that is
harsh and crude, such a book would contain
many verses sure to survive for centuries.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>As a moralist, the bent of Thoreau is
more clearly seen by most readers; and on
this side, too, he was early and strongly
charged. In a college essay of 1837 are
these sentences:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"Truth neither exalteth nor humbleth herself.
She is not too high for the low, nor yet too low
for the high. She is persuasive, not litigious,
leaving conscience to decide. She never sacrificeth
her dignity that she may secure for herself
a favorable reception. It is not a characteristic
of Truth to use men tenderly; nor is she overanxious
about appearances."</p>
</div>
<p>In another essay of the same year he
wrote:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"The order of things should be reversed:
the seventh should be man's day of toil, in which
to earn his living by the sweat of his brow,
and the other six his Sabbath of the affections
and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread
garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime
revelations of Nature."</p>
</div>
<p>This was an anticipation of his theory of
labor and leisure set forth in "Walden,"
where he says:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"For more than five years I maintained myself
solely by the labor of my hands, and I found<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</SPAN></span>
that, by working about six weeks in a year, I
could meet all the expenses of living; the whole
of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I
had free and clear for study. I found that the
occupation of day-laborer was the most independent
of any, especially as it required only
thirty or forty days in the year to support one."</p>
</div>
<p>This was true of Thoreau, because, as he
said, his "greatest skill had been to want
but little." In him this economy was a
part of morality, or even of religion.</p>
<p>"The high moral impulse," says Channing,
"never deserted him, and he resolved
early to read no book, take no walk, undertake
no enterprise, but such as he could endure
to give an account of to himself." How
early this austerity appeared in what he
wrote, has been little noticed; but I discover
it in his earliest college essays, before
he was eighteen years old. Thus, in such
a paper of the year 1834, this passage occurs:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"There appears to be something noble, something
exalted, in giving up one's own interest for
that of his fellow-beings. He is a true patriot,
who, casting aside all selfish thoughts, and not suffering
his benevolent intentions to be polluted by<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</SPAN></span>
thinking of the fame he is acquiring, presses forward
in the great work he has undertaken, with
unremitted zeal; who is as one pursuing his way
through a garden abounding with fruits of every
description, without turning aside, or regarding
the brambles which impede his progress, but pressing
onward with his eyes fixed upon the golden
fruit before him. He is worthy of all praise; his
is, indeed, true greatness."</p>
</div>
<p>In contrast with this man the young
philosopher sets before us the man who
wishes, as the Greeks said,
πλεονεκτειν [pleonektein],—to
get more than his square meal at the banquet of life.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"Aristocrats may say what they please,—liberty
and equal rights are and ever will be grateful,
till nature herself shall change; and he who
is ambitious to exercise authority over his fellow-beings,
with no view to their benefit or injury,
is to be regarded as actuated by peculiarly selfish
motives. Self-gratification must be his sole object.
Perhaps he is desirous that his name may
be handed down to posterity; that in after ages
something more may be said of him than that he
lived and died. His deeds may never be forgotten;
but is this greatness? If so, may I pass
through life unheeded and unknown!"</p>
</div>
<p>What was his own ambition—a purpose<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</SPAN></span>
in life which only the unthinking could ever
confound with selfishness—was expressed
by him early in a prayer which he threw
into this verse:—</p>
<div class="poetry-container"><div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">"Great God! I ask Thee for no meaner pelf,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">Than that I may not disappoint myself;<br/></span>
<span class="i0">That in my conduct I may soar as high<br/></span>
<span class="i0">As I can now discern with this clear eye.<br/></span>
<span class="i0">That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,<br/></span>
<span class="i0">And my life practice more than my tongue saith;<br/></span>
<span class="i4">That my low conduct may not show,<br/></span>
<span class="i6">Nor my relenting lines,<br/></span>
<span class="i4">That I thy purpose did not know,<br/></span>
<span class="i6">Or overrated thy designs."<br/></span></div>
</div></div>
<p>And it may be said of him that he acted
this prayer as well as uttered it. Says Channing
again:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"In our estimate of his character, the moral
qualities form the basis; for himself rigidly enjoined;
if in another, he could overlook delinquency.
Truth before all things; in all your
thoughts, your faintest breath, the austerest purity,
the utmost fulfilling of the interior law; faith in
friends, and an iron and flinty pursuit of right,
which nothing can tease or purchase out of us."</p>
</div>
<p>Thus it is said that when he went to
prison rather than pay his tax, which went
to support slavery in South Carolina, and<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</SPAN></span>
his friend Emerson came to the cell and
said, "Henry, why are you here?" the reply
was, "Why are you <em>not</em> here?"</p>
<p>In this act, which even his best friends
at first denounced as "mean and sneaking
and in bad taste,"—this refusal to pay the
trifling sum demanded of him by the Concord
tax-gatherer,—the outlines of his
political philosophy appear. They were
illuminated afterwards by his trenchant utterances
in denunciation of slavery and in
encomium of John Brown, who attacked
that monster in its most vulnerable part.
It was not mere whim, but a settled theory
of human nature and the institution of
government, which led him, in 1838, to renounce
the parish church and refuse to pay
its tax, in 1846 to renounce the State and
refuse tribute to it, and in 1859 to come forward,
first of all men, in public support of
Brown and his Virginia campaign. This
theory found frequent expression in his
lectures. In 1846 he said:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes
a majority of one already."</p>
</div>
<p>And again:—</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"I know this well, that if one thousand, if one
hundred, if ten men whom I could name,—if
ten <em>honest</em> men only,—ay, if one honest man,
<em>ceasing to hold slaves</em>, were actually to withdraw
from this copartnership, and be locked up in the
county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of
slavery in America. Under a government which
imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just
man is also a prison."</p>
</div>
<p>This sounded hollow then, but when that
embodiment of American justice and mercy,
John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia
prison, a dozen years later, the significance
of Thoreau's words began to be seen; and
when a few years after our countrymen
were dying by hundreds of thousands to
complete what Brown, with his single life,
had begun, the whole truth, as Thoreau
had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation.</p>
<p>In this same essay of 1846, on "Civil
Disobedience," the ultimate truth concerning
government is stated in a passage which
also does justice to Daniel Webster, our
"logic-fencer and parliamentary Hercules,"
as Carlyle called him in a letter to Emerson
in 1839. Thoreau said:—</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely
within the institution (of government)
never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They
speak of moving society, but have no resting-place
without it. They are wont to forget that
the world is not governed by policy and expediency.
Webster never goes behind government,
and so cannot speak with authority about it. His
words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate
no essential reform in the existing government;
but for thinkers, and those who legislate
for all time, he never once glances at the
subject. Yet compared with the cheap professions
of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom
and eloquence of politicians in general, his are
almost the only sensible and valuable words, and
we thank heaven for him. Comparatively, he is
always strong, original, and, above all, practical;
still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence.
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is
not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that
may consist with wrong-doing. For eighteen
hundred years the New Testament has been
written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom
and practical talent enough to avail himself
of the light which it sheds on the science of government?"</p>
</div>
<p>Such a legislator, proclaiming his law<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</SPAN></span>
from the scaffold, at last appeared in John
Brown:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"I see a book kissed here which I suppose to
be the Bible, or at least the New Testament.
That teaches me that 'whatsoever I would that
men should do unto me, I should do even so to
them.' It teaches me further to 'remember
them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I
endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say
that I am yet too young to understand that God
is any respecter of persons. I believe that, to have
interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised
poor, was not wrong, but right."</p>
</div>
<p>Before these simple words of Brown,
down went Webster and all his industry in
behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution."
When Thoreau heard them, and
saw the matchless behavior of his noble
old friend, he recognized the hour and the
man.</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"For once," he cried in the church-vestry at
Concord, "we are lifted into the region of truth
and manhood. No man, in America, has ever
stood up so persistently and effectively for the
dignity of human nature; knowing himself for a
man, and the equal of any and all governments.
The only government that I recognize,—and it<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</SPAN></span>
matters not how few are at the head of it, or how
small its army,—is that power which establishes
justice in the land."</p>
</div>
<p>Words like these have proved immortal
when spoken in the cell of Socrates, and
they lose none of their vitality, coming from
the Concord philosopher.</p>
<p>The weakness of Webster was in his
moral principles; he could not resist temptation;
could not keep out of debt; could
not avoid those obligations which the admiration
or the selfishness of his friends forced
upon him, and which left him, in his old
age, neither independence nor gratitude.
Thoreau's strength was in his moral nature,
and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage
himself, his time, or his opinions, even to
the State or the Church. The haughtiness of
his independence kept him from a thousand
temptations that beset men of less courage
and self-denial.</p>
<hr class="chap" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</SPAN></span></p>
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