Page:Poems of nature, Thoreau, 1895.djvu/21

Rh ''had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. His own verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure—is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent.&apos;''

''Perhaps what Thoreau said of Quarles, one of that school of gnomic poets of which he was a student, might be aptly applied to himself: 'It is rare to find one who was so much of a poet and so little of an artist. Hopelessly quaint, he never doubts his genius; it is only he and his God in all the world. He uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespeare; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of rough, crooked timber.' The affinity of Thoreau's style to that of Herbert, Donne, Cowley, and other minor Elizabethans, has often been remarked; and it has been truly said that the stanzas 'Sic Vita' might almost have a niche in Herbert's'' Temple.

It must be granted, then, that Thoreau, whatever his