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