Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/21

Rh It would be difficult to example elsewhere in literary history such rapt devotion to home-country. Scott at Abbotsford, Ruskin at Brantwood, Irving at Sunnyside, reveal passionate love for chosen landscape but these were residences of later years; to their serenity the authors returned from travels and conflicts amid other scenes. Perhaps, as in other phases of comparison, one is here reminded most often of Wordsworth, yet the peace of Rydal Mount succeeded years of troublous excitement and travel on the continent. Thoreau was an aggressive promulgator of the Emersonian maxim,—"Traveling is a fool's paradise." On return from brief and few excursions into regions not far distant, he was eager to reaffirm the beauties and blessings of Concord. Alcott well said,—"Thoreau thought he lived in the centre of the universe and would annex the rest of the planet to Concord." It was the mission of this poet-lover of nature to select and apotheosize in permanent form the picturesque features of Concord landscape and soil, and to bequeath to later times a rare example of nature's influence as incentive to the purest, loftiest ideals of life and the most varied and poetic concepts in literature. Hawthorne was not unjust to the scenery of Concord and its vicinage when he affirmed the lack of any marked features of beauty