mell,
taste, hear, feel that everlasting something to which we are allied, at
once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was
something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world,"
he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other: my jackknife
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 {462} 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 {463} blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of
English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring
compares with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) the greatest American romancer,
came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been
married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for
three para