We run to Nature because we are afraid of man.  Our artists paint the landscape because they cannot paint the human face.  If we could look into the eyes of a man as coolly as we can into the eyes of an animal, the products of our pens and brushes would be quite different from what they are.

V

But I suspect, after all, it makes but little difference to which school you go, whether to the woods or to the city.  A sincere man learns pretty much the same things in both places.  The differences are superficial, the resemblances deep and many.  The hermit is a hermit, and the poet a poet, whether he grow up in the town or the country.  I was forcibly reminded of this fact recently on opening the works of Charles Lamb after I had been reading those of our Henry Thoreau.  Lamb cared nothing for nature, Thoreau for little else.  One was as attached to the city and the life of the street and tavern as the other to the country and the life of animals and plants.  Yet they are close akin.  They give out the same tone and are pitched in about the same key.  Their methods are the same; so are their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric.  Thoreau has the drier humor, as might be expected, and is less stomachic.  There is more juice and unction in Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality.  Both are essayists who in a less reflective age would have been poets pure and simple.  Both were spare, high-nosed men, and I fancy a resemblance even in their portraits.  Thoreau is the Lamb of New England fields and woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of London streets and clubs.  There was a willfulness and perversity about Thoreau, behind which he concealed his shyness and his thin skin, and there was a similar foil in Lamb, though less marked, on account of his good-nature; that was a part of his armor, too.

VI

Speaking of Thoreau’s dry humor reminds me how surely the old English unctuous and sympathetic humor is dying out or has died out of our literature.  Our first notable crop of authors had it,—­ Paulding, Cooper, Irving, and in a measure Hawthorne,—­but our later humorists have it not at all, but in its stead an intellectual quickness and perception of the ludicrous that is not unmixed with scorn.

One of the marks of the great humorist, like Cervantes, or Sterne, or Scott, is that he approaches his subject, not through his head merely, but through his heart, his love, his humanity.  His humor is full of compassion, full of the milk of human kindness, and does not separate him from his subject, but unites him to it by vital ties.  How Sterne loved Uncle Toby and sympathized with him, and Cervantes his luckless knight!  I fear our humorists would have made fun of them, would have shown them up and stood aloof superior, and “laughed a laugh of merry scorn.”  Whatever else the great humorist or poet, or any artist, may be or do, there is no contempt in his