What I got by going to Canada was a cold.

August 22.

I found last winter that it was expected by my townsmen that I would give some account of Canada because I had visited it, and because many of them had, and so felt interested in the subject, - - visited it as the bullet visits the wall at which it is fired, and from which it rebounds as quickly, and flattened (somewhat damaged, perchance)!

Yes, a certain man contracted to take fifteen hundred live Yankees through Canada, at a certain rate and within a certain time.

It did not matter to him what the commodity was, if only it would pack well and were delivered to him according to agreement at the right place and time and rightly ticketed, so much in bulk, wet or dry, on deck or in the hold, at the option of the carrier how to stow the cargo and not always right side up.

In the meanwhile, it was understood that the freight was not to be willfully and intentionally debarred from seeing the country if it had eyes.

It was understood that there would be a country to be seen on either side, though that was a secret advantage which the contractors seemed not to be aware of.

I fear that I have not got much to say, not having seen much, for the very rapidity of the motion had a tendency to keep my eyelids closed.

What I got by going to Canada was a cold, and not till I get a fever, which I never had, shall I know how to appreciate it.

It is the fault of some excellent writers -- De Quincey's first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me -- that they express themselves with too great fullness and detail.

They give the most faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness.

They do not affect us by an ineffectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer; they say mean.

Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty.

Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old, but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman aqueduct to frame these, that is the art of writing.

Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes, so much life, went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition, but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build.

If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed on, it would have been far more excellent writing.

His style is nowhere kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 22, 1851