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Expect no Poor Richard maxims or counsel from Thoreau. He would tell you to invest your savings in the bonds of the Celestial Empire, or plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. He says these are excellent for sauce. He encourages one of his correspondents with the statement that he “never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud puddle; he comes out honor bright from behind every storm.”

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All Thoreau’s apparent inconsistencies and contradictions come from his radical idealism. In all his judgments upon men and things, and upon himself, he is an uncompromising idealist. All fall short. Add his habit of exaggeration and you have him saying that the pigs in the street in New York (in 1843) are the most respectable part of the population. The pigs, I suppose, lived up to the pig standard, but the people did not live up to the best human standards. Wherever the ideal leads him, there he follows. After his brother John’s death he said he did not wish ever to see John again, but only the ideal John–that other John of whom he was but the imperfect representative. Yet the loss of the real John was a great blow to him, probably the severest in his life. But he never allows himself to go on record as showing any human weakness.

“Comparatively,” he says, “we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagination.” Thoreau probably lived in his heart as much as most other persons, but his peculiar gospel is the work of his imagination. He could turn his idealism to practical account. A man who had been camping with him told me that on such expeditions he carried a small piece of cake carefully wrapped up in his pocket and that after he had eaten his dinner he would take a small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed to do the rest.

The most unpromising subject would often kindle the imagination of Thoreau. His imagination fairly runs riot over poor Bill Wheeler, a cripple and a sot who stumped along on two clumps for feet, and who earned his grog by doing chores here and there. One day Thoreau found him asleep in the woods in a low shelter which consisted of meadow hay cast over a rude frame. It was a rare find to Thoreau. A man who could turn his back upon the town and civilization like that must be some great philosopher, greater than Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps “from a deep principle,” “simplifying life, returning to nature,” having put off many things,–“luxuries, comforts, human society, even his feet,–wrestling with his thoughts.” He outdid himself. He out-Thoreaued Thoreau: “Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk he indulges, in thought, only in triumphant satires on men? [More severe than those of the Walden hermit?] I was not sure for a moment but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous point of view–” with much more to the same effect.

Thoreau’s reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to contemplate.

One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender human emotions in Thoreau, his stoical indifference is so habitual with him: “I laughed at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic story.” And he excuses himself by saying, “It is not I, but Nature in me, which was stronger than I.”

It was hard for Thoreau to get interested in young women. He once went to an evening party of thirty or forty of them, “in a small room, warm and noisy.” He was introduced to two of them, but could not hear what they said, there was such a cackling. He concludes by saying: “The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether they are there or not.”