Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/312

278 handle better, and assume the pen, that Isaak Walton and White of Selborne might not want a successor, nor the fair meadows to which we also have owed a home and the happiness of many years, their poet."

The essay, unique and representative of Thoreau's style, reviewed the committee's reports on fishes, birds, insects, plants, etc., with keen, discriminating judgment. The paper differed wholly from any ordinary criticism on scientific themes, as all of Thoreau's work differed from that of the ordinary author. Many reflective and metrical comments were interspersed, some of them used later in his first book, others forming the nucleus for later poems. The memory of winter hours, brightened by visions of summer fields, contains certain stanzas suggestive of his later poem on Musketaquid. Not alone are the poetic passages identified at once as Thoreau's work, but the prose as well bears his literary signet. Especially characteristic are the sentences on nature versus society; in them are the germs of later, more expulsive thoughts;—"In society you will not find health, but in nature. Society is always diseased and the best is the most so. There is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures.