without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
veridical for all that.




XVI.

I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of
him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young
sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next
morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one
or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.

He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors,
great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at
least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I
have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the
year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should
think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it
then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the
riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living
upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself
has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness
of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly
written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then,
when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery
could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves
with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been
destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it