THOKEAU. 395 



OUT feelings, and to remem'ber them as sources of inspira- ^ 

 tion. No poet has equalled him in his descriptions of 

 sounds. " I rejoice," he says, " that there are owls. Let 

 them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is 

 a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods 

 which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undevel- 

 oped nature which men have not recognized. They rep- 

 resent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which 

 all have." 



Thoreau was a poet, rather than a philosopher. The 

 luminous medium through which he saw aU things ap- 

 pertaining to nature incapacitated him for logical reason- 

 ing. He lived upon his intuitions. His style of writ- 

 ing was very simple, occasionally flashing with brilliant 

 metaphors, which he rarely used, but which always came 

 unsought, and were not elaborately nailed to his sentences, 

 like pictures on a wall. His satire is inimitable, and he 

 utters his paradoxes with such an air of inspiration that 

 you admire them in spite of their absurdity. He saw 

 visions and described them like a prophet, but they were 

 unintelligible to men of the world. He saw truths, but 

 they were for the imagination, not the reason. " I would," 

 he said, " rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, 

 than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride 

 on earth in an ox-cart with a free circulation, than go to 

 heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe 

 a malaria all the way." 



Thoreau always took an ethereal view of terrestrial 

 landscape, as when listening to terrestrial sounds he tried 

 to remember only the celestial strains that were blended 

 with them. He thought perhaps we might m another 

 state "look down on the surface of the air, and mark 

 where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it." He speaks 

 of a " lake of rainbow light in which for a short time he 

 lived lik e a dolphin." In a similar luminousness of 



