Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/125

 eager to see and learn; and with an undivided heart, an observing eye and mind, he returns again and again to his schooling, discovers the secret of both bird and worm, informs the music and the silence with a spirit of his own, and actually adds to the idealism and the practical knowledge of man. He saves the tree for the State and he saves the song for the world. Strictly speaking, the pages of nature's book we admire the most are those that bear marginal notes of our own personality and experience.

That is why, I think, Thoreau would not have felt as much at home in the rugged splendors of the ancient Lebanons as he did in the placid solitudes of Walden woods. He might have been a naturalist there, but not a poet; even as a stranger, coming to Concord from a distant land, might only find in the Thoreau-country the visible landscape, not of Thoreau's poetic Soul, but of nature's least poetic moods. This particular page of her book leaves him cold, and the marginal notes are often