y 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.

"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, smell,
taste, hear, feel that ever-lasting 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 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 agr