Thanks to Just Between Strangers, who points his readers to one of the most wonderful blogs I have seen: The Blog of Henry David Thoreau.
The site would be but a glorified day-by-day calendar were it not for the sheer beauty of Thoreau’s writing and the sharp eye of the site’s editor, who picks plums from fourteen year’s worth of Thoreau’s journals and posts them on the date Thoreau wrote them.
This brilliant site shows us the nineteenth-century equivalent of a blog, and, I’m sad to say, discloses how far we have fallen. Thoreau waxes rhapsodic over the partridge’s crop and the blossom’s buds, while I discuss the finer points of Randy Moss’ endzone moon.
I’m looking forward to reading Thoreau’s journals every day, and I hope that someone starts a similar site for Emerson. If you want to learn how to write, you can do no better than follow these two masters of the form.
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