Realometer reads Realometer
He was, he declared, a “Realometer,” working his feet “downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … to a hard bottom.” Quote from:
Realometer Monday, Oct. 16, 1939 [A critique of: ]THOREAU – Henry Seidel Canby -HoUghton Mifffin ($3.75). Modern readers gauge Thoreau’s genius by the qualities his contemporaries disliked. His eccentricities, prickliness, perversities, were in fact the Yankee thorns that protected him against the embrace of the Transcendentalists, the fashionable gentilities of the Lowells and Longfellows, the transient Utopianisms of the Alcotts, the dated rhetoric of his contemporaries. What moderns can see, what his contemporaries missed, is that Thoreau meant what he said.