dominant ideas. These are at the center of his teaching. In many instances these outstanding truths are expressed time after time in the two series of dialect poems. The presence of wit does not mean the absence of wisdom. In one of his essays he speaks of those individuals who "have been sent into the world unfurnished with the modulating and restraining balance wheel which we call a sense of humor." To this group all work of humor is vanity and vexation of spirit. Others, however, in the Biglow Papers will come into contact with some of the ripest, richest, and most virile thoughts in American literature. In these poems we find more of Lowell than in any other work that came from his pen. XI LESSENING THE DENOMINATOR IT is in Sartor Resartus that we read the somewhat enigmatic sentence: "The Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator." Few men have made a more consistent effort to do this than Henry David Thoreau. Walden is the story of a sincere effort to increase the value of life by lessening the denominator. The book is drawn from a journal which the eccentric naturalist kept during the two years in which he lived in the shanty on the banks of Walden Pond. The book is interesting not so much because it tells of the author's ability to support himself upon the princely sum of seventeen cents a week, but rather on account of its giving expression to a luminous and distinctively individualistic philosophy of life. The life of Thoreau could not be taken as a model. It was egoistic rather than social. After his death his friend and mentor, Emerson, wrote of him: "He was bred to no pro 177 fession; he never married; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun." Not all of these deviations from the typical life of his generation can be looked upon as virtues. For most of us Thoreau's two years of existence in the woods would not be ideal. After Whittier read the book he pronounced it "capital reading," but continued, "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." Such a reaction is easy to understand, but it is, nevertheless, decidedly unjust. The central thought of the volume is found in the words: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” Brander Matthews says Walden is a "most wholesome warning to all those who are willing to let life itself be smothered out of them by luxuries they have allowed to become necessaries." In one of the cleverest, but unfairest essays which came from his pen, Lowell without mercy excoriates Thoreau and his philosophy of life. But in spite of himself, Lowell gets to the heart of the significance of the Walden experiment and admits that its "aim was a noble and useful one in the direction of plain living and high thinking." It was a protest against the tendency of the American to become the slave of his possessions. The story is told that a friend attempted to present Thoreau with a mat to be placed in front of the door of the Walden hut, but he unhesitatingly refused it. He said that by wiping his feet on the grass he could save himself the trouble of taking care of another article. Henry Thoreau may have been an extremist. However, it is possible that it would be better for an individual to follow his example rather than to make himself the slave of a clutter of a conglomerate of objects neither beautiful nor useful. It was not many years ago that the largest and best-located room in the American home was filled with haircloth furniture, crayon portraits in hideous frames, and other æsthetic monstrosities, and then mercifully closed for about three hundred and sixtyfour days of the year; but visited frequently by the industrious housewife, who must keep her treasures free from the defiling presence of dust. Even to-day thousands of American women are the servants of their dwelling places. More than one life has been shortened by utterly useless labor. Walden is a sermon A person against the sin of Marthaism. "troubled about many things" has no time to master the art of living. Thoreau has been criticized because instead of making money by manufacturing lead pencils, he took time to enjoy life in his own peculiar way. He could say like Walt Whitman, "I loaf and invite my soul." It must be admitted that not every loafer invites his soul to be a partner in his enterprises. The typical American, however, is likely to be too busy to realize that he is a being fundamentally spiritual. "Young people," said a college professor to one of his classes, "you look as though you spent twice as much time studying as you should." The jaded-looking group perceptibly brightened, but he continued as follows, "But you recite as though you did not spend half enough time at your books." It is easy indeed to be tremendously busy doing nothing. In Chaucer's Prolog there is a typical and delightful couplet in which the poet says of one of his characters, "Nowher so busy as a man as he ther nas, A life can be buried beneath futile details, |