Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/347

Rh copy of poems given him by their author, he wrote,—"Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem,—an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp."

Thoreau's volumes, exclusive of the extracts from his journals, edited since his death, are quite distinctive and representative of the versatile traits of the man. The first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," shows the naturalist, in the romantic and poetic phases of his development, and the literary student fresh from the influence of the classics. His philosophic inquiries are in incipient stages. In "Walden" the latter find more experimental treatment and the book was the work of a naturalist-philosopher, even as the earlier volume bore stamp of the naturalist-poet. The three volumes, "Excursions," "The Maine Woods," and "Cape Cod," records largely prepared by the author for the press during his last months, are yet more representative of the naturalist and his zeal for botanical, geological, and ethnological discoveries. The traveler was a scientist, but he was also a poet and a philosopher; he had become a keen student of life as well as nature, and these later volumes contain a gallery of vivid types and individuals.

"A Week," with its varied themes chosen for