HENEY D. THOEEAU 37 



of others. It is wholly true of Thoreau. Nature 

 was the glass ia which he saw himself. He says the 

 partridge loves peas, but not those that go into the 

 pot with her ! All the peas Thoreau loved had been 

 in the pot with him and were seasoned by him. 



I trust I do not in the least undervalue Thoreau's 

 natural history notes; I only wish there were more 

 of them. What makes them so valuable and charm- 

 ing is his rare descriptive powers. He could give 

 the simple fact with the freshest and finest poetic 

 bloom upon it. If there is little or no felicitous 

 seeing in Thoreau, there is felicitous description: 

 he does not see what another would not, but he 

 describes what he sees as few others can; his happy 

 literary talent makes up for the poverty of his 

 observation. That is, we are never surprised at 

 what he sees, but are surprised and tickled at the 

 way he tells what he sees. He notes, for instance, 

 the arrival of the high-hole in spring; we all note 

 it, every schoolboy notes it, but who has described 

 it as Thoreau does: "The loud jpeoj) of a pigeon 

 woodpecker is heard, and anon the prolonged loud 

 and shrill cackle calling the thin-wooded hillsides 

 and pastures to life. It is like the note of an alarm- 

 clock set last fall so as to wake Nature up at exactly 

 this date, — u]}, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, 

 up!" He says: "The note of the first bluebird 

 in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow 

 beneath. It is evidently soft and soothing, and, as 

 surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher tem- 

 perature. It is the accent of the south wind, its 

 vernacular. " 



