Word: thoreau
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...stripped Europeans": stripped by Protestantism of humanity, by science of faith, by the Age-of-Reason of government. A lack or exaggeration of one of these three-the kingdom, the power, the glory-has characterized all but 30 years of U. S. history. The golden day of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Whitman lasted from...
What of the future? Mr. Mumford is not one to forget that Whitman apostrophized a locomotive, that Emerson thought a swift transatlantic liner could be as beautiful as a star, that Thoreau enjoyed wind singing on telegraph wires. But machines were only instruments, not manna or masters to these men. So he finds little health in the so-called Chicago realists of today. He sees their renowned leader, Theodore Dreiser, swallowing the drab scene "with a vast hippopotamus yawn"; engulfing, nothing more: no digestion or creation. Philosopher John Dewey he finds serviceable but juiceless, with a mode of expression...
...frivolity sufficient to incur occasional censure from the authorities, behaviour in contrast to his later position as one of the spiritual leaders of literature. In this role he was not of the type of Dickens in the handling of concrete and social questions, but was more akin to Thoreau in looking at life from an individual point of view, and in leading the movement for greater individual freedom...
While at Walden, Thoreau proved that individual men may overcome wild creature's instinctive fear of humanity. Birds and beasts showed no terror of him and it has been said by enthusiasts that the very fish of the stream would swim unafraid between his fingers...
...Thoreau, however, was not a naturalist in the scientific sense; he was a lover of nature, free from the shackles of pedantry...