ublished in 'The
Union Magazine;' the second, 'Chesuncook,' came out in the 'Atlantic
Monthly,' in 1858; the last is now for the first time printed. The
contents of the volume are as follows: Ktaadn, Chesuncook, The Allegash
and East Branch; in the Appendix we have Trees, Flowers, and Shrubs,
List of Plants, List of Birds, Quadrupeds, Outfit for an Excursion, and
a List of Indian Words. Henry D. Thoreau was an enthusiastic lover of
nature, but no blind adorer of her loveliness. He knew her in all her
moods, was familiar with all her caprices. He was a man of strong brain,
and of accurate knowledge in such fields as it pleased him to study. The
woods have never before had such an accurate biographer, such a true
painter. He saw them with the eye of the poet as well as that of the
naturalist. Scholarship and imagination roam with him in the primeval
forests. After the most accurate and detailed description of a moose
which had been killed by his Indian guide, this anti-sentimentalist, but
true forest lover says: 'Here, just at the head of the murmuring rapids,
Joe now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket knife, while I looked
on; and a tragical business it was--to see that still warm and
palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from
the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within
its seemly robe, which was made to hide it.' There is no joy of the
hunter here! The words are as 'tragical' and tender as were those of the
melancholy Jaques. That 'warm milk and rent udder' seems to make the
stately creature half human. He proceeds:

'But on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose hunting.
I had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen
it, though I had been willing to learn how the Indian manoeuvred;
but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. The
afternoon's tragedy and my share in it, as it affected the
_innocence_, destroyed the _pleasure_ of my adventure. This hunting
of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him--not even
for the sake of his hide--without making any extraordinary exertion
or running any risk yourself, is too much like going out by night
to some woodside pasture and shooting your neighbor's horses. These
are God's own horses, poor timid creatures, that will run fast
enough as soon as they smell you, though they are _nine_ feet high
(of