Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let
him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery.
Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh--with a screaming wail inside
it, if one can hear well--rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up,
toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true;
then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.
Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of
reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few
noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life.
"Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let
us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,--momentarily
created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."
The noblest type I have ever known of this _extra-vagance_, this
wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity,
as of a newborn babe,--with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my
observation,--with his indomitable persistency,--by the aid also of that
all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his
priceless gift,--he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an
indescribable charm.
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