LEAF AND TENDRIL 



confounded the song of the hermit thrush with that 

 of the wood thrush. He records having heard the 

 latter even in April, but never the former. In the 

 Maine woods and on Monadnock it is always the 

 wood thrush which he hears, and never the hermit. 



But if Thoreau's ear was sometimes at fault, I 

 do not recall that his eye ever was, while his mind 

 was always honest. He had an instinct for the truth, 

 and while we may admit that the truth he was in 

 quest of in nature was not always scientific truth, or 

 the truth of natural history, but was often the truth 

 of the poet and the mystic, yet he was very careful 

 about his facts; he liked to be able to make an 

 exact statement, to clinch his observations by going 

 again and again to the spot. He never taxes your 

 credulity. He had never been bitten by the mad 

 dog of sensationalism that has bitten certain of our 

 later nature writers. 



Thoreau made no eflFort to humanize the animals. 

 What he aimed mainly to do was to invest his ac- 

 count of them with literary charm, not by imputing 

 to them impossible things, but by describing them 

 in a way impossible to a less poetic nature. The 

 novel and the surprising are not in the act of the 

 bird or beast itself, but in Thoreau's way of telling 

 what it did. To draw upon your imagination for 

 your facts is one thing; to draw upon your imagi- 

 nation in describing what you see is quite another. 

 The new school of nature writers will afford many 

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