He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning
of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the
shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my
chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy
morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a
nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None
of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the
woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their
recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would
assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in
proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the
forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any
poet's string."

It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism.
Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its identity
with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and
he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature
are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In
man, the Absolute--that is, God--becomes conscious of himself; makes of
himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men,"
said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our
infinite World-Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly
present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused
of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the
underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the
transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine.
Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality
which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's _Two Rivers_: