Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/168

144 of the chosen form of expression during Thoreau's later years, though the writer failed entirely to comprehend the true purport of that expression. While Thoreau was in New York in 1843, occasionally visiting this relative, the latter wrote,—"I think he (Thoreau) is getting to view things more as others do than formerly,—he remarked he had been studying books, now he intended to study nature and daily life. It would be well! "There is a fund of latent sarcasm and family censure in that final, laconic sentence. This resolve made by Thoreau, at Staten Island, as a result of tentative years, became his life-profession,—to study nature and life, in poetic and philosophic phases, and to express this communion of ideas in authorship. Walden was the climactic step in his undistracted devotion to the messages of nature. Here also he served apprenticeship to literature as a profession. Already several poems and essays had appeared from his pen in The Dial and other journals. During the months at Walden he wrote the essay on "Thomas Carlyle and his Works," which appeared in Graham's Magazine. In addition to the definite material for his first two books, largely gathered and evolved by the little lake-retreat, he had, also, scattered thoughts and observation on nature and life which were destined to form the