sensitiveness is
changed only in degree.

But the message of Thoreau, though his fervency may be inconstant and
his human appeal not always direct, is, both in thought and spirit, as
universal as that of any man who ever wrote or sang--as universal as it
is nontemporaneous--as universal as it is free from the measure of
history, as "solitude is free from the measure of the miles of space
that intervene between man and his fellows." In spite of the fact that
Henry James (who knows almost everything) says that "Thoreau is more
than provincial--that he is parochial," let us repeat that Henry
Thoreau, in respect to thought, sentiment, imagination, and soul, in
respect to every element except that of place of physical being--a
thing that means so much to some--is as universal as any personality in
literature. That he said upon being shown a specimen grass from Iceland
that the same species could be found in Concord is evidence of his
universality, not of his parochialism. He was so universal that he did
not need to travel around the world to PROVE it. "I have more of God,
they more of the road." "It is not worth while to go around the world
to count the cats in Zanzibar." With Marcus Aurelius, if he had seen
the present he had seen all, from eternity and all time forever.

Thoreau's susceptibility to natural sounds was probably greater than
that of many practical musicians. True, this appeal is mainly through
the sensational element which Herbert Spencer thinks the predominant
beauty of music. Thoreau seems able to weave from this source some
perfect transcendental symphonies. Strains from the Orient get the best
of some of the modern French music but not of Thoreau. He seems more
interested in than influenced by Oriental philosophy. He admires its
ways of resignation and self-contemplation but he doesn't contemplate
himself in the same way. He often quotes from the Eastern scriptures
passages which were they his own he would probably omit, i.e., the
Vedas say "all intelligences awake with the morning." This seems
unworthy of "accompanying the undulations of celestial music" found on
this same page, in which an "ode to morning" is sung--"the awakening to
newly acquired forces and aspirations from within to a higher life than
we fell asleep from ... for all memorable events transpire in the morning
time and in the morning atmosphere." Thus it is not the whole tone
scale of the Orient but the scale of a Walden morning--"music