Perhaps,
on second thought, it might be well to keep one old maid and one old
bachelor in each town, by way of warning, just as the Spartans did
their drunken helots."
Discussing the question of some of his "bad rhymes," and what to do
about them, he wrote once: "I heartily thank thee for thy suggestions.
Let me have more of them. I had a hearty laugh at thy hint of the
'carnal' bearing of one of my lines. It is now simply _rural._ I
might have made some other needful changes had I not been suffering
with headache all day."
Occasionally the fire which burned in him would flame out, as when he
writes in 1851: "So your Union-tinkers have really caught a 'nigger'
at last! A very pretty and refreshing sight it must have been to
Sabbath-going Christians yesterday--that _chained_ court-house of
yours. And Bunker Hill Monument looking down upon all! But the matter
is too sad for irony. God forgive the miserable politicians who gamble
for office with dice loaded with human hearts!"
From time to time, also, we find him expressing his literary opinions
eagerly and simply as friend may talk with friend, and without
aspiring to literary judgment. "Thoreau's 'Walden' is capital reading,
but very wicked and heathenish. The practical moral of it seems to be
that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live
as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me, I prefer walking
on two legs."
It would be unjust to Whittier to quote this talk on paper as his
final opinion upon Thoreau, for he afterwards read everything he
wrote, and was a warm appreciator of his work.
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