This mental habit and his continual suffering made him only too
serious, too much in earnest. Jests were not in his line, but he
sometimes wrote poetry of the very highest order. He is the first and
most original of American thinkers.
What these two dissimilar men had in common was good Anglo-Saxon
manliness--which is after all the foundation of common-sense. They
wished to live as other men had lived before them, and not in any new,
unusual, or eccentric manner. They believed that virtue was to be found
in the great world rather than out of it; among human habitations, and
in dealing with all kinds of people rather than by an isolated life at
Brook Farm or in Walden Woods. They sought not after any rare and
Utopian excellencies, but contented themselves with a plain, sensible,
every-day morality. They were neither vegetarians, teetotalers,
non-resistants, nor socialists. They considered it no sin to love a
woman or to fight a man. They may be called anti-sentimentalists.
Neither were they blind followers of custom and tradition. They wished
to be in the vanguard of civilization, and they were conscious that to
do this they must not only accept the results of others, but add
something of their own. They endeavored to become acquainted with the
best that was thought and known in their time, both in literature and in
other matters. They thus became excellent critics, as well as versatile
and many-sided men.
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