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Which Thoreau called the 'color of colors, in the Hebrew signified to have dominion, and in early art was symbolical or emblematic of Divine love, creative power, etc. The word Adam, we have been taught, signifies red man; it does mean 'the blood, which, of course, originated 'to be red, as a secondary signification.
We get welcome glimpses of the man, of his moods, of his diversions, of his home occupations, of his self-criticism. We see him as a host, as a lecturer, as a gardener, as a member of a rural community. We see him in his walks and talks with friends and neighbors with Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Jones Very, Hawthorne, and others and get snatches of the conversations.
If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord, when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.
But how such a haunter of woods escaped identifying the bird is a puzzle. In his walks in the Maine woods Thoreau failed to discriminate the song of the hermit thrush from that of the wood thrush. The melody, no doubt, went to his heart, and that was enough.
But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely similar in meaning.
We need have no respect for a state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses.
But while these three figures were, after Emerson and Thoreau, the most representative of the group, the student of the Transcendental period will be equally interested in watching its influence upon many other types of young men: upon future journalists and publicists like George William Curtis, Charles A. Dana, and George Ripley; upon religionists like Orestes Brownson, Father Hecker, and James Freeman Clarke; and upon poets like Jones Very, Christopher.
Most of the evidence is circumstantial, but you remember what your friend Thoreau said about circumstantial evidence something to the effect that it's sometimes pretty convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk." "But has Thatcher found the trout?" "Well, no; he hasn't exactly found the trout, but there's enough, there's altogether too much!" ended Dan despairingly.
Marie did not shrink yes, that would have been an insult. Even Jan would have said that. For was not this Duval, to whom she owed all the happiness in her life Duval, more than brother to Jan Thoreau, her husband? "And you are Marie?" said Blake. "Yes, m'sieu, I am Marie." A joyous note trembled in her voice as she drew back from the cot.
Herein we get a glimpse of the Thoreau ideal which led his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked the human sentiment. He may or may not have been a "cross man," but he certainly did not "drill well," for which his readers have reason to be thankful.
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