FullReads

Seventh December, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six.–That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I remember best the poem of “Walt Whitman an American” and the “Sundown” poem. There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least, simply sensual…. As for its sensuality–and it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears–I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read them without harm.

On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and American, after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that have been preached in this land, put together, are equal to it for preaching. We ought greatly to rejoice in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You can’t confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn. How they must shudder when they read him!

To be sure, I sometimes feel a little imposed on. By his heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind, prepared to see wonders–as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain–stirs me well up, and then–throws in a thousand of brick. Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. Wonderfully like the Orientals, too, considering that, when I asked him if he had read them, he answered, “No; tell me about them.”

Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. Walt is a great fellow.

A lady once asked John Burroughs this question: “What would become of this world if everybody in it patterned after Henry Thoreau?” And Ol’ John replied, “It would be much improved.”

But your Uncle John is a humorist–he knows that Henry Ward Beecher was right when he said, “God never made but one Thoreau–that was enough, but we are grateful for the one.”

Thoreau was a poet-naturalist, and the lesson he taught us is that this is the most beautiful world to know anything about, and there are enough curious and wonderful things right under our feet, and over our heads, and all around us, to amuse, divert, interest and instruct us for a lifetime. We need only a little.

Use your eyes!

“How do you manage to find so many Indian relics?” a friend asked Thoreau. “Just like this,” he replied, and stooping over, he picked up an arrowhead under the friend’s foot. At dinner once at a neighbor’s he was asked what dish he preferred, and his answer was, “The nearest.” To him, everything was good–he uttered no complaints and made no demands.

When asked by a clergyman why he did not go to church, he said, “It is the rafters–I can’t stand them–when I look up, I want to gaze straight into the blue sky.” Then he turned the tables and asked the interrogator a question: “Did you ever happen, accidentally, to say anything while you were preaching?” Yet preachers of brains were always attracted to him: Harrison Blake, to whom he wrote more letters than to any one else, was a Congregational preacher. And when Horace Greeley took Thoreau to Plymouth Church, Beecher invited him to sit on the platform and quoted him as one who saw God in autumn’s every burning bush.

The wit of the man–his direct speech, and all of his beautiful indifference for the good opinion of those whom others follow after and lie in wait for–was sublime. Meanness, hypocrisy, secrecy and subterfuge had no place in Thoreau’s nature.