Page:Poems of nature, Thoreau, 1895.djvu/18

xiv himself set some value on them in this connection may be gathered from a sentence in the last of his published letters, in which he writes to a correspondent: 'I am pleased when you say that in The Week you like especially those little snatches of poetry interspersed through the book, for these I suppose are the least attractive to most readers?&apos;

''Everything that concerns a great writer has its special interest; and Thoreau's poetry, whatever its intrinsic value may be, is full of personal significance; in fact, as Emerson remarked, 'his biography is in his verses.' Thus, many of these poems will be found to throw light on certain passages of his life. 'Inspiration,' for example, is the record of his soul's awakening to the new impulse of transcendentalism; the stanzas on 'Sympathy' perhaps contain in a thinly disguised form the story of his youthful love, and the sacrifice which he imposed on himself to avoid rivalry with his brother; the lines 'To my Brother' refer to the sudden and tragic death of John Thoreau in 1842; and 'The Departure' is believed to be the poem in which Henry Thoreau, when leaving in''