Here is a man content to take a
walk, fill his mind with observation, and then come home to think.
Repeat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change or expand
the thought, and you have Thoreau. No wonder he brought his first
edition home, not seriously depleted, and made his library of it!
Thoreau needs excerpting to be popular. Most nature books do. But
not to be valuable!
For see what this queer genius was doing. Lovingly, laboriously,
and sometimes a little tediously, he was studying his environment.
For some generations his ancestors had lived on a new soil, too
busy in squeezing life from it to be practically aware of its
differences. They and the rest had altered Massachusetts.
Massachusetts had altered them. Why? To what? The answer is not
yet ready. But here is one descendant who will know at least what
Massachusetts _is_--wave, wind, soil, and the life therein and
thereon. He begins humbly with the little things; but humanly, not
as the out-and-out scientist goes to work, to classify or to
study the narrower laws of organic development; or romantically as
the sentimentalist, who intones his "Ah!" at the sight of dying
leaves or the cocoon becoming moth.
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