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Updated: May 12, 2025
Is it that the injured and indignant soul so vindicates its own essential and divine strength, and says, unconsciously, to the most uncontrolled anguish, "There is in me a life no mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether extinct in any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the outer tenement, darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its approaches with seas to drown, there is that within that God alone can vanquish, yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with pertinacious accuracy every leaf or bloom that was within the range of sight, the dark green leaves of the wax-flower springing from their red stem, veined and threaded with creamy white, stiff and quaint in form and growth, the bending sprays of goldenrod that bowed their light and brittle stems over me, swaying gently to and fro in the gentle wind, the tiny scarlet cups of moss that held a little drop of dew brimming over their rims of fire, a spark in the ashy gray moss-beds where they stood, the shrinking and wan wood-asters, branched out widely, but set with meagre bloom, every half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence, the rough seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks, the light that pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson: all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces of its track.
As regards his literary craftsmanship, Lowell charges him only with having revived the age of concetti while he fancied himself going back to a preclassical nature, basing the charge on such a far-fetched comparison as that in which Thoreau declares his preference for "the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds" over the wit of the Greek sages as it comes to us in the "Banquet" of Xenophon a kind of perversity of comparison all too frequent with Thoreau.
Another conspicuous fault as a writer is his frequent use of false analogies, or his comparison of things which have no ground of relationship, as when he says: "A day passed in the society of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines, and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds."
You want your cushions to be of the soft moss-beds of the piny woods, and, with the unparalleled sauce of a healthy, hearty appetite, you want to eat your dinner out of doors, cooked over the outdoor fire, and to drink water from a birch-bark cup, brought cool and dripping from the bubbling spring.
The numerous toy villages, with tiny spires projecting out of them, were just as the children might have left them when done with play the day before; the forest tracts were diminished to cushions of moss; one or two big lakes were dwarfed to ponds, the smaller ones to puddles though they did not look like puddles, but like blue teardrops which had fallen and lodged in slight depressions, conformable to their shapes, among the moss-beds and the smooth levels of dainty green farm-land; the microscopic steamboats glided along, as in a city reservoir, taking a mighty time to cover the distance between ports which seemed only a yard apart; and the isthmus which separated two lakes looked as if one might stretch out on it and lie with both elbows in the water, yet we knew invisible wagons were toiling across it and finding the distance a tedious one.
The numerous toy villages, with tiny spires projecting out of them, were just as the children might have left them when done with play the day before; the forest tracts were diminished to cushions of moss; one or two big lakes were dwarfed to ponds, the smaller ones to puddles though they did not look like puddles, but like blue teardrops which had fallen and lodged in slight depressions, conformable to their shapes, among the moss-beds and the smooth levels of dainty green farm-land; the microscopic steamboats glided along, as in a city reservoir, taking a mighty time to cover the distance between ports which seemed only a yard apart; and the isthmus which separated two lakes looked as if one might stretch out on it and lie with both elbows in the water, yet we knew invisible wagons were toiling across it and finding the distance a tedious one.
Dick picked his way gingerly over curving moss-beds, assisting his balance by a number of little cedar trees. Then something happened. Dick says the side of the hill slid out from under him. The fact of the matter is, probably, the skin-moss over loose rounded stones gave way. Dick sat down and began slowly to bump down the slant of the roof.
Grot nymph-haunted, Garlanded over with vine, and acanthus, and clambering roses, Cool in the fierce still noon, where the streams glance clear in the moss-beds; and here and there, beyond the braes and meads, blue glimpses of the far-off summer sea; and all this told in a language and a metre which shapes itself almost unconsciously, wave after wave, into the most luscious song.
A film athwart the pathway quivers many-hued against purple shade fragrant with warm pines, deep moss-beds, feathery ferns. The little brown squirrel drops tail, and leaps; the inmost bird is startled to a chance tuneless note. From silence into silence things move. Peeps of the revelling splendour above and around enliven the conscious full heart within.
A film athwart the pathway quivers many-hued against purple shade fragrant with warm pines, deep moss-beds, feathery ferns. The little brown squirrel drops tail, and leaps; the inmost bird is startled to a chance tuneless note. From silence into silence things move. Peeps of the revelling splendour above and around enliven the conscious full heart within.
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