Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/324

290 included in the "Poems of Nature," edited by Mr. Salt and Mr. Sanborn;

Fifty years ago Thoreau studied nature and became her scribe and interpreter in the days when she was scantily known and meagrely valued. With limitations, which the last half century has emphasized because of the rapid increase of scientific knowledge, with an excess of mysticism and poetic subjectivity, echo of the true New England Transcendentalism, he was the first American naturalist to combine science and