24 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THOREAV. 



tions of Indians is like catechizing beavers and rab 

 bits. In his last visit to Maine he had great satis 

 faction from Joseph Polis, an intelligent Indian of 

 Oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks. 



He was equally interested in every natural fact. 

 The depth of his perception found likeness of law 

 throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who 

 so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. 

 He was no pedant of a department. His eye was 

 open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found 

 these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. 

 He thought the best of music was in single strains ; 

 and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of 

 the telegraph wire. 



His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt 

 wanted a lyric facility and technical skill ; but he had 

 the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. He 

 was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on 

 poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be de 

 ceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic 

 element in any composition, and his thirst for this 

 made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superfi 

 cial graces. He would pass by many delicate rhythms, 

 but he would have detected every live stanza or line 

 in a volume, and knew very well where to find an 

 equal poetic charm in prose. He was so enamored 

 of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written 

 poems in very light esteem in the comparison. He 

 admired ^Eschylus and Pindar; but, when some one 

 was co*mmending them, he said that ^Eschylus and the 

 Greeks, in describing Apollo and Orpheus, had given 

 no song, or no good one. &quot; They ought not to have 

 moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a 

 hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of 



