Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/325

Rh, nature facts and poetry, in volumes and unpublished journals that defy competition in devoted life-absorption. Mr. Paul Elmer More has well said,—"Thoreau, the greatest by far of our writers on nature and the creator of a new sentiment in literature, was the creator also of a new manner of writing about nature." However carefully students may follow his methods of research and portrayal, they fail to gain that concentrated and pervasive spirit which was his. He so closely identified himself with the seasons and all their messages that his pages teem with a glow and optimism which no rigor or fog can chill. Recall the cheery challenge to complaint about winter,—"Though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a merry wood-chopper, and warm-blooded youth, as blithe as summer."

If Thoreau stands as the pioneer poet-student of nature, he is also the most fearless, stimulating philosopher and seer of the interrelations between nature and society. He antithesized the complex, sham commercialism, then a mere threat, now an enormous reality, as wholly averse to the true expansion of mind and soul. In nature and a constant devotion to her manifold lessons, he found