Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/40

 go through with it. He was also the last reader of Davenant's Gondibert, upon which many an adventurous youth has been stranded. But Thoreau, like Emerson and Charles Lamb, whose researches in Elizabethan fields aided him, and are acknowledged in his commonplace book, from 1839 until 1845 made a faithful study of that copious and racy literature that filled the century from Surrey and Wyatt to Crashaw and Vaughan, and in this scrap-book before me more than forty authors of that period are quoted, some of them at much length. The editors of Thoreau's dozen volumes should have had this scrap-book before them when seeking the source of the quotations in which he so abounds.

Let us not seek to overvalue this treasure-trove of an author to whom each successive year brings a new army of readers, and of whom every reader becomes a warm admirer. It is not a finished piece of English like many of his essays; he had not in 1844 reached that perfection in his style, nor that ripeness of thought which Walden and the later writings display. It belongs,