so characteristic of Thoreau that there is little risk in overemphasising it. "Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more for ever?" he wrote in Walden; intensely sensitive as he was to music, it seemed to have especially the power of awakening in him the vague but powerful sentiment which so habitually haunted him. "Let us hear a strain of music, and we are at once advertised of a life which no man has told us of, which no preacher preaches;" "music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated; it is the only assured tone."

"There are in music such strains as far surpass any faith which man has ever had in the loftiness of his destiny. . . . Music hath caught a higher pace than any virtue I know. It is the arch reformer. It hastens the sun to his setting. It invites him to his rising. It is the sweetest reproach, a measured satire. I know there is somewhere a people where this heroism has place. Things are to be learnt which it will be sweet to learn. This cannot be all rumour. When I hear this I think of that everlasting something which is not mere sound, but is to be a thrilling reality, and I can consent to go about the meanest work for as many years as it pleases the Hindoo penance, for a year of the gods were as nothing to that which shall come after. What, then, can I do to hasten that other time, or that space where there shall be no time, and where these things shall be a more living part of my life, where there shall be no discords in my life?"

The devotee of "the most indefinite waking dream," turning to lofty and illusive intuitions of the spirit for solace and guidance in the daily conduct of life, Thoreau possessed a personality and a mode of thought not of the easiest to fix and realise.

"If I am too cold for human friendship," wrote Thoreau in his diary, "I trust I shall not soon be too cold for natural

happiness. It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other." There are, no doubt, many ways of approaching nature; the mood in which it was very characteristic of Thoreau to approach nature was doubtless productive in him of a spirit of alienation from his fellows. A passage which occurs in the volume of extracts from his diary entitled Winter is singularly elucidative of the mood in which Thoreau approached nature. This passage is indeed worth quoting at length. Thoreau wrote his autobiography day by day, but it is not often that he strikes the key-note of himself so distinctly as in the passage referred to :

...

"January 7th, 1857, P.M.-To Walden. . . . It is bitter cold, with a cutting N.W. wind. The pond is now a plain snow field, but there are no tracks of fishers on it. It is too cold for them. . . . All animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather. All tracks are concealed in an hour or two. Some have to make

their paths two or three times a day. The fisherman is not here, for his lines would freeze in. I go through the woods toward the cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow field. There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene and profitable thought. The objects are elevating. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability could in the least redeem it, dining with the governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sproutlands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what

others get by church-going and prayer. I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous, and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the American, out of my head and be sane a part of every day. I wish to forget a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out to these solitudes where the problem of existence is simplified. I get away a mile or two from the town, into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself. Our sky-lights are thus far away from the ordinary resorts of men. I am not satisfied with ordinary windows. I must have a true skylight, and that is outside the village. I am not thus expanded, recreated, enlightened when I meet a company of men. It chances that the sociable, the town and country club, the farmers' club does not prove a sky-light to me. . . . The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks. This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort or boneset to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible companion, and walked with him. There at last my nerves are steadied, my senses and my mind do their office. I am aware that most of my neighbours would think it a hardship to be compelled to linger here one hour, especially this bleak day, and yet I receive this sweet and ineffable compensation for it. It is the most agreeable thing I do. I love and celebrate nature even in detail, because I love the scenery of these interviews and translations. I love to remember every creature that was at this club. I thus get off a certain social scurf.... I do not consider the other animals brutes in the common sense. I am

attracted toward them undoubtedly because I never heard any nonsense from them. I have not convicted them of folly, or vanity, or pomposity, or stupidity in dealing with me. Their vices, at any rate, do not interfere with me. My fairies invariably take to flight when a man appears upon the scene. In a caucus, a meeting-house, a lyceum, a club-room, there is nothing like this fine experience for me. But away out of the town, on Brown's scrub oak lot, which was sold the other day for six dollars an acre, I have company such as England cannot buy nor afford. This society is what I live, what I survey for. I subscribe generously to this all that I have and am. There in that Well Meadow field, perhaps, I feel in my element again, as when a fish is put back into the water. I wash off all my chagrins. All things go smoothly as the axle of the universe."

There is a notable significance in these lines, in which, throughout, the transcendentalist is very much en évidence. “Alone in distant woods or fields, . . . even on a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related."-"I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the American, out of my head, and be sane a part of every day."—"I wish to forget a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men, . . . and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified."—"It is always as if I met in these places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible companion, and walked with him."—"I love and celebrate nature even in detail, because I love the scenery of these interviews and translations." There is something pathetic in this revelation, in this record of the effort of this ascetic, yearning, melancholy dreamer, denying to himself the common human interests and affections, and crusading in bleak fields and woods after the vague, unfulfilled, and

inexpressible illusion of his spirit. A mood such as he records here and one cannot resist the belief that it was a very habitual mood with him-was obviously not one which would tend to bring him into closer alliance and sympathy with his fellows. And it explains a great deal that occurs in his journals, which Mr. H. G. O. Blake has edited with such pious care, and which one cannot resist thinking are often such dreary reading, though illuminated as they so frequently are by exquisite descriptive passages, and others in which Thoreau's genius specially shows itself. Day by day Thoreau expended himself on a minute bibliography of nature, but often this bibliography amounts to a mere uninspired exercise of observation. "Saw some small ducks, teal, and widgeons."- "Saw several flocks of large grayish and whitish or speckled ducks, I suppose the same that P. calls sheldrakes. They, like ducks, commonly incline to fly in a line about an equal distance apart," and so on. Doubtless Thoreau may have found some escape from ennui in writing down things of this sort, but one can hardly think that they call for reprinting. Sensitive to a degree, analytical and selfsearching to the point of pathology, exquisitely literary, and, probably, the most extreme exponent that has ever lived of certain lofty and difficult intuitions, to which he persistently sought to give correspondence in the tenour of his daily life, Thoreau's is a rare and remarkable spirit; his alienation from the ordinary human concerns, his innumerable limitations, the egoism of his transcendentalism, these are the penalties he paid for being what he was. Without the limitations where could this Thoreau spirit have been nourished and become known of men? Let him, as he may, stand as a reminder of things in a materialistic and unimaginative age apt to be forgotten.