Page:Poems of nature, Thoreau, 1895.djvu/19

Rh 1843 ''the home of Emerson, where he had lived for two years, took farewell of his friends. The numerous other allusions to the life and scenery of Concord, with which Thoreau's own life was so closely blended, require no comment or explanation''.

Thoreau's view of the poetic character, as stated by him in The Week, ''is illustrative of his own position. 'A true poem,' he says, 'is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art: one seeks food for nutriment, the other for flavor; one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate.' There can be no doubt to which of these classes Thoreau himself belongs. If metrical skill be insisted on as an indispensable condition of poetry, he can hardly be ranked among the poets; nor, where this criterion was dominant, was it surprising that, as one of his contemporaries tells us, with reference to his verses in The Dial, &apos;an unquenchable laughter, like that of the gods at Vulcan's''