Truth, even in
literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it
cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect
of anecdote on simple minds; and hence good biographies and
works of high, imaginative art, are not only far more
entertaining, but far more edifying, than books of theory or
precept. Now Thoreau could not clothe his opinions in the
garment of art, for that was not his talent; but he sought to
gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar
relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record
of experience.
Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should
call mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly
to the aspect of the external world and to its influence upon
our feelings, was one which he was never weary of attempting
to reproduce in his books. The seeming significance of
nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the
senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the
mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits.
It appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near
enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but
ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct
upon our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured and
expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear
between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature.
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