in single
strains," as Emerson says, which inspired many of the polyphonies and
harmonies that come to us through his poetry. Who can be forever
melancholy "with Aeolian music like this"?

This is but one of many ways in which Thoreau looked to Nature for his
greatest inspirations. In her he found an analogy to the Fundamental of
Transcendentalism. The "innate goodness" of Nature is or can be a moral
influence; Mother Nature, if man will but let her, will keep him
straight--straight spiritually and so morally and even mentally. If he
will take her as a companion, and teacher, and not as a duty or a
creed, she will give him greater thrills and teach him greater truths
than man can give or teach--she will reveal mysteries that mankind has
long concealed. It was the soul of Nature not natural history that
Thoreau was after. A naturalist's mind is one predominantly scientific,
more interested in the relation of a flower to other flowers than its
relation to any philosophy or anyone's philosophy. A transcendent love
of Nature and writing "Rhus glabra" after sumac doesn't necessarily
make a naturalist. It would seem that although thorough in observation
(not very thorough according to Mr. Burroughs) and with a keen
perception of the specific, a naturalist--inherently--was exactly what
Thoreau was not. He seems rather to let Nature put him under her
microscope than to hold her under his. He was too fond of Nature to
practice vivisection upon her. He would have found that painful, "for
was he not a part with her?" But he had this trait of a naturalist,
which is usually foreign to poets, even great ones; he observed acutely
even things that did not particularly interest him--a useful natural
gift rather than a virtue.

The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic, but the love of
Nature surely does not. Thoreau no more than Emerson could be said to
have compounded doctrines. His thinking was too broad for that. If
Thoreau's was a religion of Nature, as some say,--and by that they
mean that through Nature's influence man is brought to a deeper
contemplation, to a more spiritual self-scrutiny, and thus closer to
God,--it had apparently no definite doctrines. Some of his theories
regarding natural and social phenomena and his experiments in the art
of living are certainly not doctrinal in form, and if they are in
substance it didn't disturb Thoreau and it needn't us... "In proportion
as he simplifies his life the laws of th