So says Goethe:
"Spat erklingt was fruh erklang;
Gluck und Ungluck wird Gesang."
Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he
had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in
good books. He said well, "Life is not habitually seen from
any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the
light of literature." But the literature he loved was of the
heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring;
such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be
entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing
institutions - such I call good books." He did not think
them easy to be read. "The heroic books," he says, "even if
printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will always be
in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,
conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of
what wisdom and valour and generosity we have." Nor does he
suppose that such books are easily written. "Great prose, of
equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse,"
says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level height,
a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The
poet often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is
off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer
has conquered like a Roman and settled colonies.
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