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."

{460}

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_:

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1]
Repeats the music of the rain,
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee as thou through Concord plain.

"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes;
Through flood and sea and firmament,
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

{461}

"I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream,
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through passion, thought, through power and dream."

This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard world of matter
becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in
it--sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map
around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In _me_ is
the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond,

"I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er."

"Suddenly old Time winked at me--ah, you know me, you rogue--and news
had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital
health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, s