Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/44

 and yet few writers knew better than he how to introduce the graceful Latin of Linnaeus with rhetorical effect. Channing said, "He spared no pains to make out his bird by Wilson and Nuttall;" and adds, "When he went to Minnesota in 1861 and found the crab-apple native, and native Indians, he pleased himself with a new friend,—the gopher with thirteen stripes;" Lahontan's "Swiss squirrel" with Swiss doublet and something like a Switzer's cap marked out on his thighs.

Probably the chief disappointment of Thoreau, in connection with his Minnesota Notes, was that he had not strength left him to elaborate his many observations on the American Indian into a volume. In 1859-60 he had declined the request of Mrs. Stearns, an ardent friend of John Brown, to write that hero's life, because he had his own manuscripts to edit, and specially those relating to the red man. The passages in this volume taken from the journal of 1839 had been supplemented by many hundred observations in Maine, in Canada, and now a few in Minnesota; he had read zealously, and [xxxvi]