HENRY D. THOKEAU 41 



little patience witli in his neighbors, he applied to 

 his peculiar ends. He took the day and the season 

 by the foretop. "How many mornings," he says 

 in "Walden," "summer and winter, before yet any 

 neighbor was stirring about his business, have I 

 been about mine ! " He had an eye to the main 

 chance, to a good investment. He probed the 

 swamps like a butter-buyer, he sampled the plants 

 and the trees and lichens like a tea-taster. He 

 made a burning-glass of a piece of ice; he made 

 sugar from a pumpkin and from the red majjle, and 

 wine from the sap of the black birch, and boiled 

 rook-tripe for an hour and tried it as food. If he 

 missed any virtue or excellence in these things or 

 in anything in his line, or any suggestion to his 

 genius, he felt like a man who had missed a good 

 bargain. Yet he sometimes paused in this peeping 

 and prying into nature, and cast a regretful look 

 backward. "Ah, those youthful days," he says 

 in his journal, under date of March 30, 1853, "are 

 they never to return? when the walker does not too 

 enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, 

 tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena that 

 showed themselves in him, _ his_a£panding body, his 

 intellectand_heart ! No worm or insect, quadruped 

 or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded uni- 

 verse was his. A bird has now become a mote in 

 his eye." Then he proceeds to dig out a wood- 

 chuck. 



In "Walden" Thoreau pretends to quote the 

 following passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Gar- 



