books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not
even Lowell the "last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more
unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an
accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his
translations attest. He had some acquaintance with several modern
languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of books
on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in
the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical
essays in the "Dial," his letters and the bookish allusions
throughout his writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the
records of the past. He left some three thousand manuscript pages
of notes on the American Indians, whose history and character had
fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies gave
him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his
life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous
measurements of river currents, in his notes upon the annual
flowering of plants and the migration of birds. The more
thoroughly trained naturalists of our own day detect him now and
again in error as to his birds and plants, just as specialists in
Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for him
unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was
not impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more
fun out of his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever
stimulated as many men and women in the happy use of their eyes?
He would have had slight patience with much of the sentimental
nature study of our generation, and certainly an intellectual
contempt for much that we read and write about the call of the
wild; but no reader of his books can escape his infection for the
freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in nature.
Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish,