me as if I looked through colored crystal." Is it possible, then, to
reach the end of the rainbow? Why did he not dig for the pot of gold
that is buried there? How he could be aware that he was standing at
the foot of one leg of the glowing arch is to me a mystery. When I
see a rainbow, it is always immediately in front of me. I am standing
exactly between the highest point of the arch and the sun, and the
laws of optics ordain that it can be seen in no other way. You can
never see a rainbow at an angle. It always faces you squarely. Hence
no two persons see exactly the same bow, because no two persons can
occupy exactly the same place at the same time. The bow you see is
directed to you alone. Move to the right or the left, and it moves as
fast as you do. You cannot flank it or reach its end. It is about the
most subtle and significant phenomenon that everyday Nature presents
to us. Unapproachable as a spirit, like a visitant from another world,
yet the creation of the familiar sun and rain!

How Thoreau found himself standing in the bow's abutment will always
remain a puzzle to me. Observers standing on high mountains with the
sun low in the west have seen the bow as a complete circle. This one
can understand.

We can point many a moral and adorn many a tale with Thoreau's
shortcomings and failures in his treatment of nature themes. Channing
quotes him as saying that sometimes "you must see with the inside of
your eye." I think that Thoreau saw, or tried to see, with the inside
of his eye too often. He does not always see correctly, and many times
he sees more of Thoreau than he does of the nature he assumes to be
looking at. Truly it is "needless to travel for wonders," but the
wonderful is not one with the fantastic or the far-fetched. Forcible
expression, as I have said, was his ruling passion as a writer. Only
when he is free from its thrall, which in his best moments he surely
is, does he write well. When he can forget Thoreau and remember only
nature, we get those delightful descriptions and reflections in
"Walden." When he goes to the Maine woods or to Cape Cod or to Canada,
he leaves all his fantastic rhetoric behind him and gives us sane and
refreshing books. In his walks with Channing one suspects he often let
himself go to all lengths, did his best to turn the world inside out,
as he did at times in his Journals, for his own edification and that
of his wondering disciple.

To see analogies and resemblan