is 6 
NATURE NOTES. 
By some curious process the pupil unconsciously acquired the 
manners and tone of voice of his master. But Emerson’s main 
influence was in waking the hidden fires of Thoreau's own deep 
and self-sufficient nature. Emerson was in turn himself im- 
pressed, for we are told that “he delighted in being led to the 
very inner shrines of the wood god by this man, clear-eyed and 
true, and stern enough to be trusted with their secrets.” Then 
was the time of the New England transcendentalists. Thoreau 
hated systems and the labelling of men, but in the essential 
principles of transcendentalism — the inward guiding light and the 
spiritual symbolism of natural phenomena — was his faith fixed : 
“ I hear beyond the range of sound, 
I see beyond the range of sight,” 
he sings. The practical teaching of the transcendentalists was 
simplicity of life, and that each should think for himself and labour 
with his own hands ; the political teaching, the exaltation 
of the individual and depression of the state in its controlling 
power. 
Thoreau loved the country round Concord, and believed that 
it contained all of wild life sufficient for the interpretation of 
nature. So Richard Jefferies believed of Wiltshire. The Con- 
cord district was an epitome of nature’s presentments, and 
Thoreau’s desires stretched no further. Once he went to Canada. 
This was his grand tour. 
The experiment of seclusion at Walden pond was made in 
1845. His purpose was “ to front only the essential facts of life. 
To reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, 
why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it and 
publish its meanness to the world, or if it were sublime to know 
it by experience.” It will be observed that the relationship of 
man to man was an irrelevant factor in forming a true estimate 
of the value of life. 
So he built his hut by Walden pond, sowed his beans (hoed 
them too), and let his “ consciousness ” ferment. Every morning 
he bathed. He cultivated about two-and-a-half acres, and “ when 
my hoe tinkled against the stones that music echoed to the woods 
and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labour which 
yielded an instant and immeasurable crop.” 
He took long walks in all weathers, and in the deep snow 
would “keep an appointment” with a birch tree ten miles off. 
But some days he devoted entirely to contemplation, when he 
could not afford “ to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment 
to any work whether of the head or hands.” He rvould then 
sit in his doorway rapt in reverie. At such times he said 
(contesting the charge of idleness) that he “ grew like corn in 
the night.” 
His food was almost strictly vegetarian, his drink water, nor 
■did he use tobacco. “ Simplify, simplify,” was his cry. His 
motive, however, was not ascetic, not to mortify the flesh, but 
