Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/11

Rh themes, and no one has written with a finer appreciation of it. Still, in ordinary society, he found it so difficult to reach essential humanity through the civilized and conventional, that he turned to nature, who was ever ready to meet his highest mood. From the haunts of business and the common intercourse of men he went into the woods and fields as from a solitary desert into society. He might have said with another,—he did virtually say,—"If we go solitary to streams and mountains, it is to meet man there where he is more than ever man."

But while I have sought in these selections to represent the progressive life of nature, I have also been careful to give Thoreau's thoughts, because though his personality is in a striking degree single, he being ever the same man in his conversation, letters, books, and the details of his life, though his observation is imbedded in his philosophy ("how to observe is how to behave," etc.), yet" if any distinction may be made, his thoughts or philosophy seem to me incomparably the more interesting and important. He declined from the first to live for the common prizes of society, for wealth or even what is called a competence, for professional, social, political, or even literary success; and this not from a want of ambition or a purpose, but from an ambition far higher than the