PREFATORY NOTE.

“I am startled that God can make me so rich even
with my own cheap stores. It needs but a few wisps of
straw in the sun, some small word dropped, or that has
lain long silent in some book. When heaven begins and
the dead arise no trumpet is blown.
wind will blow."

Perhaps the south

-THOREAU.

"THE fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot," wrote Thoreau on one occasion (March 5, 1853) in his diary, briefly summing himself up in a formula. It would be an error to lay stress on a casual passage such as this, but the more one reads of the daily entries which Thoreau made in that journal intime which he so consistently kept throughout his life, the more one is impressed by the fundamental quality of his mysticism, how deeply it was rooted within him, how powerfully and constantly its influence predominated with him. Thoreau, indeed, devoted his days and his nights to the observation of nature; reading the records made day by day of this observation, considering the character of these records, and getting every now and then glimpses of the motives which inspired the making of them, we come to feel that even where in passages we should at first be little inclined to suspect it, the transcendentalist was often very much to the fore; the natural philosopher arrived

haltingly only in the second place. Mankind has a wilful way of being gregarious; for its being so no doubt various pleas might be set up. Thoreau for the most part consistently contended in his own person against this gregarious instinct, and the results which spring from it; he would hold himself as aloof as possible from the common ways and concerns of the world, or would approach it with an air of humorously forlorn, or cynical, or transcendental criticism. "This, our respectable daily life, in which the man of common sense, the Englishman of the world, stands so squarely, and on which our institutions are founded, is in fact the veriest illusion, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision; but that faint glimmer of reality which sometimes illuminates the darkness of daylight for all men, reveals something more solid and enduring than adamant, which is in fact the corner-stone of the world." Denying to himself the small world of Concord, Massachusetts, in which he happened to be placed, decrying and ignoring the interests of the larger world, he had yet perforce to occupy himself with something. Betaking himself to nature, he discovered there a secret and a gospel; and all the time, busying himself with nature and natural observation, or what not, he waited. "Is not the attitude of expectation divine?—a sort of home-made divineness? Does it not compel a kind of sphere-music to attend on it? and do not its satisfactions merge at length, by insensible degrees, in the enjoyment of the thing expected?" Thoreau, one might say, was the man who expected,-who expected always the apparition of something finer and rarer than life affords, and it is in the expression of this expectancy, of this tension of feeling in regard to something, he does not quite know what, that he becomes as nearly inspired and dithyrambic as he will allow himself to be. This attitude of expectation is