Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist.  By William Ellery Ghanning.  Boston:  Roberts Bros.

Mr. Charming is a boon, and we would not have missed his lucubration on any account.  Now we know how Margaret Fuller talked and in what dialect they wrote The Dial.  It was with this sententiousness, this solemn attitude over the infinitely little, this care to compose paragraphs out of short sentences completely disconnected, that the old Concord philosophy was enunciated.  Nobody outside the circle ever caught the exact accent except one of Dickens’s characters—­Mr. F.’s aunt—­who would interrupt a dinner conversation to observe, “There’s milestones on the Dover road.”  “Above our heads,” says Mr. Channing, “the nighthawk rips;” “see the frog bellying the world in the warm pool;” “the rats scrabbling.”  This sententiousness is consistent, on Mr. Channing’s part, with the most stupefying ignorance of words and things, as in the sentence, “forced to conceal the raveled sleeve of care by buttoning up his outer garments.”  It is particularly imposing in the judgments, nearly always severe, of individuals, and the reader lays down the present book sure that here, at last, he has found a truly superior person.  Schoolcraft is simply “poor Schoolcraft,” and of course subsides; Miss Martineau is “that Minerva mediocre;” Carlyle is “Thomas Carlyle with his bilious howls and bankrupt draughts on hope.”  Hawthorne, he learns, though we cannot tell from whence, “thought it inexpressibly ridiculous that any one should notice man’s miseries, these being his staple product,” and was “swallowed up in the wretchedness of life;” also, “the Concord novelist was a handsome, bulky character, with a soft rolling gait; a wit said he seemed like a boned pirate.”  From these more or less contemptuous views of mankind at large Mr. Channing turns with a kind of somersault to an intense admiration for Thoreau.  Could he but write of him in his own style—­supposing him to have a style—­he would have been in danger of producing a sensible book, and nous autres would have lost one delight; but it is the perfection of comedy to see the apocalyptic trio—­Emerson stepping off grandly and gladly into the clouds—­Thoreau, his principal disciple, following with a good imitation of the gait, but with evident self-consciousness—­and finally Mr. Channing—­

                             to see him’s rare sport
  Step in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short.

It would be unfair to judge Henry D. Thoreau by the indiscreet laudations of his friends.  He was cut out more nearly in the pattern of a hermit than any man of modern time.  His love of solitude was probably sincere, his surliness was his breeding, and he extracted from his painful, unsocial habitudes the peculiar poetry which suits with hardship.  It was not for him to sing of summer and nectarines, nor to honestly appreciate or kindly judge those who did so; but he sang of winter, of crab-apples, of cranberries, of reptiles, of field-mice, with just the right accent and with a tingling vibration of life in his chords.  The Bernard Palissy of literature, he modeled his frogs and water-snakes so true that they seemed better than birds of paradise.