1pFFjZK

2 SO THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
surpass his labored sentences. Whose are the truly labored
sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician
and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description
of work, the simple record of the month's labor in
the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. A
sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough
instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight
to the end. The scholar requires hard and serious labor to
give an impetus to his thought. He will learn to grasp the
pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an
axe or a sword. When we consider the weak and nerveless
periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and
inches come up to the standard of their race, and are not
deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice
of thews and sinews. What ! these proportions, these
bones, and this their work ! Hands which could have
felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not
have tasked a lady's fingers
! Can this be a stalwart man's
work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles
in his heel ?
They who set up the blocks of Stonehenge did
somewhat, if they only laid out their strength for once, and
stretched themselves.
1
Samuel Daniel.
2
Compare Coleridge, above, p. 205.
3
Paolo Emilio Botta (1802-1870), of Italian extraction, an oriental traveller
and Assyriologist.
4
"Wolofs" better "Yolof" (i.e. "Speakers"); a negro race of the
western Sudan, whose language is " the medium of communication throughout
Senegambia." Thoreau may have been acquainted with De Roger's
Recherches philosophiques sur la langue ouloje, Paris, 1829.