“Two killed on the patriots’ side and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why, here every ant was a Buttrick—‘Fire! for God’s sake, fire!’—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer!” Even in a woodpile there is matter for an epic, if genius be there to look on. This battle, he informs us, “took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive Slave Bill.”

There is no finer quality in “Walden,” perhaps, than the skill with which small happenings are made worthy to stand on the same page with passages of large philosophy. The seeing eye and the recording pen—to these there are no trifles; or, if there are, they are such things as the newspapers chronicle, the day’s “events,” so called. If the hermit had no other company, there was always the pond, apt for any mood: now to be sounded patiently with a line; now to be curiously studied as to its mysterious rise and fall, or its changes of temperature; now to be dreamed over by the poet’s imagination. It was the best of good neighbors. “Of all the characters I have known,” says Thoreau, who loved nothing better than a piece of affectionate hyperbole, “perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor.”

Walden was not alone. White Pond, more beautiful still, lay not far off in one direction, and Flint’s Pond in another. And if the reader desires to see Thoreau in his fieriest mood, white-hot with indignation, let him turn to the page or two in which the “unclean and stupid farmer” who gave his name to this “sky water,” though his “presence perchance cursed all the shore,” is held up at arm’s length and lashed with scorn. “I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God he had made it.”

In general, it must be acknowledged, Thoreau seems to have found his fellow men either irritating or amusing. With them for his theme, he is apt to become satirical. Paupers, half-wits, idlers, and ne’er-do-wells, for these he owned a liking; as he did also for men of good parts and little cultivation, half-wild men, fitting naturally into a wild landscape. Farmers, he declared in so many words, were respectable and interesting to him in proportion as they were poor. As for the beauty of a “model farm,” he “would as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it.” Other philosophers and moralists have professed similar views, of course, but in these later times, when so much has been discovered that was unknown in Judea, the attitude strikes us as peculiar and almost novel. When Thoreau went to the village of an afternoon, as he did every few days, to hear the news,—“which, taken in homœopathic doses, is really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves or the peeping of frogs” (a grave concession that),—he found it comparable to a muskrat colony which he visited on other days in the river meadows. He went to both places on a natural historical errand, to observe the habits of the colonists. Between him and the villagers it was probably a drawn battle. They thought him a queer one, and he was not backward about returning the compliment. They wondered how he could bear to live alone, and he wondered how they could bear to live so near to each other. It was mainly a want of courage, he thought, that restrained them from a life of separate independence. For his own part, he had a great deal of company in his house, especially in the morning, when nobody called.

What he felt upon this subject he gave utterance to with all frankness. “I confess,” he says in one of his letters, “that it is rare that I rise to sentiment in my relations to men,—ordinarily to a mere patient, or may be wholesome, good-will.” He could imagine something more, but is speaking of things as they are. But if he talks thus about his fellows, he can be equally unsparing with himself. He is himself only a kind of scarecrow,—“a bundle of straw in a man’s clothing, with a few bits of tin to sparkle in the sun dangling about me, as if I were hard at work there in the field.” “Do not waste any reverence on my attitude,” he charges a correspondent, who, we may guess, had been rather profuse in his protestations. “I merely manage to sit up where I have dropped. I am sure that my acquaintances mistake me. They ask my advice on high matters, but they do not know even how poorly on’t I am for hats and shoes. I have hardly a shift. Just as shabby as I am in my outward apparel, ay, and more lamentably shabby, am I in my inward substance. If I should turn myself inside out, my rags and meanness would indeed appear.