Page:Poems of nature, Thoreau, 1895.djvu/22

xviii ''limitations, had the poet's vision, and sometimes the poet's divine faculty; and if this was manifested more frequently in his masterly prose, it was neither absent from his verse nor from the whole tenor of his character. It was his destiny to be one of the greatest prose writers whom America has produced, and he had a strong, perhaps an exaggerated, sense of the dignity of this calling. 'Great prose,' he thinks, 'of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered, like a Roman, and settled colonies.&apos;''

''If therefore, we cannot unreservedly place Thoreau among the poetical brotherhood, we may at least recognise that he was a poet in the larger sense in which his friends so regarded, him—he felt, thought, acted, and lived as a poet, though he did not always write as one. In his own words''—