Essays - Henry David Thoreau (best e reader for android .TXT) 📗

But to speak of his composition. It is a genuine Yankee style, without fiction⁠—real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. But like those same mountain-torrents, there is rather too much slope to his channel, and the rainbow sprays and evaporations go double-quick-time to heaven, while the body of his water falls headlong to the plain. We would have more pause and deliberation, occasionally, if only to bring his tide to a head⁠—more frequent expansions of the stream, still, bottomless mountain tarns, perchance inland seas, and at length the deep ocean itself.

We cannot do better than enrich our pages with a few extracts from such articles as we have at hand. Who can help sympathizing with his righteous impatience, when invited to hold his peace or endeavor to convince the understandings of the people by well-ordered arguments?

“Bandy compliments and arguments with the somnambulist, on ‘table rock,’ when all the waters of Lake Superior are thundering in the great horseshoe, and deafening the very war of the elements! Would you not shout to him with a clap of thunder through a speaking-trumpet, if you could command it⁠—if possible to reach his senses in his appalling extremity! Did Jonah argufy with the city of Ninevah⁠—‘yet forty days,’ cried the vagabond prophet, ‘and Ninevah shall be overthrown!’ That was his salutation. And did the ‘Property and Standing’ turn up their noses at him, and set the mob on to him? Did the clergy discountenance him, and call him extravagant, misguided, a divider of churches, a disturber of parishes? What would have become of that city, if they had done this? Did they ‘approve his principles’ but dislike his ‘measures’ and his ‘spirit’!!

“Slavery must be cried down, denounced down, ridiculed down, and pro-slavery with it, or rather before it. Slavery will go when pro-slavery starts. The sheep will follow when the bell-weather leads. Down, then, with the bloody system, out of the land with it, and out of the world with it⁠—into the Red Sea with it. Men sha’nt be enslaved in this country any longer. Women and children sha’nt be flogged here any longer. If you undertake to hinder us, the worst is your own.”⁠—“But this is all fanaticism. Wait and see.”

He thus raises the anti-slavery “war-whoop” in New Hampshire, when an important convention is to be held, sending the summons⁠—

“To none but the wholehearted, fully-committed, cross-the-Rubicon spirits.”⁠—“From rich ‘old Cheshire,’ from Rockingham, with her horizon setting down away to the salt sea.”⁠—“From where the sun sets behind Kearsarge, even to where he rises gloriously over Moses Norris’s own town of Pittsfield⁠—and from Amoskeag to Ragged Mountains⁠—Coos⁠—Upper Coos, home of the everlasting hills⁠—send out your bold advocates of human rights⁠—wherever they lay, scattered by lonely lake, or Indian stream, or ‘Grant’ or ‘Location’⁠—from the trout-haunted brooks of the Amoriscoggin, and where the adventurous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the St. Lawrence.

“Scattered and insulated men, wherever the light of philanthropy and liberty has beamed in upon your solitary spirits, come down to us like your streams and clouds⁠—and our own Grafton, all about among your dear hills, and your mountain-flanked valleys⁠—whether you home along the swift Ammonoosuck, the cold Pemigewassett, or the ox-bowed Connecticut.”⁠—

“We are slow, brethren, dishonorably slow, in a cause like ours. Our feet should be as ‘hinds’ feet.’ ‘Liberty lies bleeding.’ The leaden-colored wing of slavery obscures the land with its baleful shadow. Let us come together, and inquire at the hand of the Lord, what is to be done.”

And again; on occasion of a New England Convention, in the Second-Advent Tabernacle, in Boston, he desires to try one more blast, as it were, “on Fabyan’s White Mountain horn.”

“Ho, then, people of the Bay State⁠—men, women, and children; children, women, and men, scattered friends of the friendless, wheresoever ye inhabit⁠—if habitations ye have, as such friends have not always⁠—along the sea-beat border of Old Essex and the Puritan Landing, and up beyond sight of the sea-cloud, among the inland hills, where the sun rises and sets upon the dry land, in that vale of the Connecticut, too fair for human content and too fertile for virtuous industry⁠—where deepens that haughtiest of Earth’s streams, on its seaward way, proud with the pride of old Massachusetts. Are there any friends of the friendless negro haunting such a valley as this? In God’s name, I fear there are none, or few, for the very scene looks apathy and oblivion to the genius of humanity. I blow you the summons, though. Come, if any of you are there.

“And gallant little Rhode Island; transcendent abolitionists of the tiny Commonwealth. I need not call you. You are called the year round, and, instead of sleeping in your tents, stand harnessed, and with trumpets in your hands⁠—every one!

“Connecticut! yonder, the home of the Burleighs, the Monroes, and the Hudsons, and the native land of old George Benson! are you ready? ‘All ready!’

“Maine here, off east, looking from my mountain post like an everglade. Where is your Sam. Fessenden, who stood stormproof ’gainst New Organization in ’38? Has he too much name as a jurist and orator to be found at a New England Convention in ’43? God forbid. Come one and all of you from ‘Down East’ to Boston, on the 30th, and let the sails of your coasters whiten all the sea-road. Alas! there are scarce enough of you to man a fishing boat. Come up, mighty in your fewness.

“And green Vermont, what has become of your anti-slavery host⁠—thick as your mountain maples⁠—mastering your very politics⁠—not by balance of power, but by sturdy majority. Where are you now? Will you be at the Advent Meeting on the 30th of May? Has anti-slavery waxed too trying for your offhand, how-are-ye, humanity? Have you