Henry D. Thoreau was the last male descendant of a French ancestor who came to this country from the isle of Guernsey. His character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood in singular combination with a very strong Saxon genius.

He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He was graduated at Harvard College, in 1837, but without any literary distinction. An iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their service to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. After leaving the University, he joined his brother in teaching a private school, which he soon renounced. His father was a manufacturer of lead pencils, and Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than was then in use. After completing his experiments, he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained their certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best London manufacture, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied, that he should never make another pencil. “Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.” He resumed his endless walks, and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as yet never speaking of zoology or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of technical and textual science.

Makebelieve, in one form or another, seems inseparable from American literature: either a writer sinks his nationality like Irving and G. P. R. James, and tries to pass for an European man of letters, which is comparatively an innocent delusion which sometimes approaches a reality, or he tries to pass off the actual circumstances of America as a substitute for all the ideal stimulants of the historic past. Emerson can scarcely be accused of neglecting history, but he is certainly the hierophant of the second and more mischievous school of American makebelieve. In every one of his writings he has inculcated with unwavering energy the dogma, which is the one thing needed to make our generation utterly joyless, that our present life of every day is divine and ideal if we could but think so. At first this unreasoning optimism was associated with other and more interesting elements. There was something certainly fresh and stimulating in Mr. Emerson's combination of a dreamy transcendentalism and a hardy personality, cynicism and neoplatonism, and though neither element was new, each had the effect of novelty on both sides of the Atlantic. But a man who is sure of his own life gets tired of asserting it, and Mr. Emerson seems to have little else to assert.

We are bound to thank the author, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for a copy of his Oration delivered before the Adelphi Society of Waterville college, (Maine,) in August last. It is the production of one who thinks much, often deeply, but who writes muddily; and this latter quality, we are sorry to be compelled to add, is the evident result of an imitation of the German- English system of Thomas Carlyle, which whoso handleth, not being expert therewith, useth an edged tool, and will assuredly be wounded thereby. There is thought enough in this production to furnish forth half a dozen of your modern college orators; but there is nevertheless not a thought in it, which is worthy any thing, that would not have produced tenfold more effect had it been left open to the hearer or reader's mind, instead of being covered with a grotesque garb of motley language. Now and then in a striking simile or felicitous illustration Mr. Emerson approaches the visible and the natural; as in this passage, for example: The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship. Who would value any number of miles of Atlantic brine bounded by lines of latitude and longitude? Confine it by granite rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and it is filled with expression; and the point of greatest interest is where the land and water meet.

In his latest production, Mr. Emerson is as crabbed, as entertaining, and as “cocksure” as when he first startled the Phi- Beta-Kappa Society with his paradoxes on the relations of man to the universe, or when with Margaret Fuller he laid the foundations of what at one time seemed likely to be a new school of metaphysical speculation. One advantage, however, he still possesses over most of the pseudo-philosophers at whose head he stands. He is slow in utterance, and patient in labour. His method of work is that of great thinkers. Gradually he absorbs and assimilates whatever science or history can furnish, and slowly and reflectively he gives us the result of his thoughts. So patiently does he brood over his eggs, that if they are sometimes addled the fault is scarcely his. Already, however, his influence is on the wane. He wants that last and most useful gift of genius, the power to keep young in society, and to advance with advancing years. Modern work and modern speculation scarcely reach him. Science, with the dazzling visions it has of late suggested, has, of course, some attraction for him, and history illustrates his views on the future of man; but modern art finds him cold, distrustful, and unsympathetic, and ready to apply old canons and shibboleths. He begins to stand, accordingly, among the men of today, a figure of the past, not yet remote enough to be venerable, but unserviceable for present needs, hanging

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery.

A book that reprints contemporary reviews of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau must be weighted in favor of the former. Emerson published an address celebrating Concord's centennial in 1835 and followed it with his first major work, Nature, the next year. Before his death in 1882, he published eight books of essays, two original volumes of poetry, and five major addresses. His books were published and widely reviewed in England, where a number of original collections of his essays and addresses were put together. In addition, by the mid-1840s, he had become known as the leading spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement in America. On the other hand, Thoreau published two books during his lifetime, neither of which had an English edition until two decades after his death in 1862. The beginnings of his reputation as a major American writer did not come until nearly half a century after Emerson had been firmly established in his role as a writer of importance.

The present volume, therefore, devotes nearly four times as much space to reviews of Emerson's writings as it does to reviews of Thoreau's works. This disparity in the number of words allotted to each writer reflects both their relative importance as seen by their contemporaries and the length of their careers. Reviews of sixteen Emerson titles are represented in this book, as compared to only two by Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, both published while he was alive). Because of this, I have approached my discussion of the reviews of each man's works differently in this introduction.

Mr. Emerson crossed the seas to lecture to us—he re-crossed them to lecture at us. The first man he talked to in England was Coleridge—the last Mr. Carlyle; and between the first word and the last—as here recorded—there is an interval of talk, some of it pleasant, more of it eccentric, and not a little of it dreary. On the whole, England has been happy enough to please her critic; yet, with all his politeness and rosy compliments, Mr. Emerson leaves us with an impression that America, not England, is the true seat of the Saxon race. The same imperial character has been claimed, by various writers, for the Isle of Thanet, and for Guernsey and Jersey. Mr. Emerson likes our people, with a few drawbacks and qualifications, which he must record and deplore,—such as our want of wit and fancy; but we suspect he likes us chiefly for those qualities of mind and character in which he finds some resemblances to qualities nearer home. In fact, Mr. Emerson, when painting the model Englishman to his friends in the United States, is evidently thinking of the Broadway rather than the Strand; and the faults which he finds with us we read of with perfect good humour, because we know they are not our faults, so much as they are our neighbours'. For example, when he writes:—“A strong common sense, which it is not easy to unseat or disturb, marks the English mind for a thousand years; a rude strength newly applied to thought, as of sailors and soldiers who had lately learned to read.

It is impossible to mistake the tendency of our times, and of our country especially. This is a period of intellectual decline. Mind, in our generation, has lost its daring, its power, and its grasp, its originality, its self-reliance, its lofty aspirations, its individuality; and enfeebled and timid, it finds occupation in false sentimentalism, or a material philosophy, of which selfishness is the principle, and £ s. d. the sum. As Wordsworth says, “The world is too much with us.”

The proofs are patent where they would most readily be found—in our literature. Philosophy in its loftiest form is extinct among us. Poetry, which is philosophy revealing itself in language intelligible to the work-day world, can find no listeners. The periodical press, which faithfully reflects the popular taste, sedulously shuns either topic. Every day, more and more are they compelled to cater for the amusement of their readers, and to avoid anything that has the form, or even the substance, of instruction. The only writings that reward their authors, because the only works that find an extensive sale, are exciting romances, jest-books, and illustrated works—publications which either kindle the passions, or create a laugh, or please the eye, and impose no labour on the understanding; and stir not up the mind to the task of thought. Of the numerous periodicals published in Great Britain, The Critic alone devotes the slightest attention to the highest branches of human knowledge—the divinest efforts of the immortal spirit that our age is striving to bind and chain to earth—the Mental Philosophy which is really the most grovelling calculations of utility, and the Philosophy of Being, which, if it do no more than lift us nigher to God, is entitled to some notice from those who profess to guide the age, though, in fact, they but reflect it.