something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world,"
he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife
will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson,
to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close
observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the
minuter aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have
produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in none of
them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and
the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had the
woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination
did not stop short with the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the
Maine woods was to him "as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp
and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His
trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a
voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just
above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly
on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober
billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cranberry
Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the
North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in
Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord.

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in
a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of
thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of
mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American
literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American
life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true
to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put
forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English