The Service

More than any of Thoreau's writings, The Service displays that taste for paradox which often is found in authors of a singular originality, and of such a profound imagination as Thoreau had. Its form was perhaps suggested by the discourses on Peace and Non-Resistance which in 1840 were so numerous in New England; while the native pugnacity of Thoreau provoked him to take up the cause of war and persist in the apostolic symbolism of the Lord, and the Middle-Age Crusader. Human life is his topic, and he views it with an Oriental scope of thought, in which distinctions of Time and Space are lost in the wide prospect of Eternity and Immortality.