Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/171

Rh which, after his death, would give to the reading-world unique pleasure, and, to their author, tardy fame.

If Thoreau's profession during his mature life was clearly authorship, it had a specific range,—"study of nature and of life," the work of the naturalist and the poet-philosopher. Excursions, fifty years ago a rarity in comparison with to-day, were purposeless rambles to the majority of participants. Excursions for study, as conducted by Thoreau, were novelties in his day but are common current experiences. In this respect, as in others, was he distinctly "fifty years in advance of his times." The memorable excursion of 1839 with his brother on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, was the first of many extended trips for study of botany, ornithology, and their allied branches. While in encampment at Walden, in 1846, he spent two weeks in the Maine woods, finding special pleasure in the study of Indian words and customs. The combined accounts of this excursion and the later one with Channing in 1853-4, were not published until after Thoreau's death but the first study in the later series, "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," appeared in Sartain's Union Magazine, through the influence of Mr. Greeley, in 1848; for it, Thoreau received twenty-five dollars. Graham, after compulsion by Mr. Greeley, had also paid seventy-five