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Updated: June 10, 2025
His poetry reflects these features, reflects the high moral and historic significance of the European landscape, while the poetry of Emerson, and of Thoreau, is born of the wildness and elusiveness of our more capricious and unkempt Nature. The walker has no axe to grind; he sniffs the air for new adventure; he loiters in old scenes, he gleans in old fields.
He watched Marie as she wallowed the thick slices in yellow corn-meal, and listened to the first hissing sputter of them as they were dropped into the hot grease of the skillet. And the odour of the fish, taken only yesterday from the net which Thoreau kept in the frozen lake, made him hungry. This was unusual. It was unexpected as other things that had happened. It puzzled him.
But there is much in Thoreau that is neither Gallic nor Scottish, but pure Thoreau. The most point-blank and authoritative criticism within my knowledge that Thoreau has received at the hands of his countrymen came from the pen of Lowell about 1864, and was included in "My Study Windows."
Thoreau lent him a new set of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest stone in the darkest night, or come nearer to seeing it than those of most mortals.
Thoreau, one of the most devoted admirers of nature, says in his "Walden," that, "The first ice is especially interesting, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom, where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass."
"I understand, Jan Thoreau, and I praise the blessed Virgin that it was Jean de Gravois who killed the missioner out upon the ice of Lac Bain!" "But the other," persisted Jan, "the other, which says that I " "Stop!" cried Jean sharply. He came around the table and seized Jan's hands in the iron grip of his lithe, brown fingers. "That is something for you to forget.
It was a deep, cool sleep; a slumber beside a shadowed pool, with the wind whispering gently in strange tree tops, and water rippling softly in a strange stream. Sunshine followed storm. The winter sun was cresting the tree tops when Thoreau got out of his bed to build a fire in the big stove. It was nine o'clock, and bitterly cold.
Thoreau had better rights in his land than he. They felt, too, the superiority of character which addressed all men with a native authority. Indian relics abound in Concord, arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles, and fragments of pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the savages frequented.
From the top of the ridge, where the trail cut over the mountain, he looked like a bit of fire- blackened wood half buried in the snow. Half-way up the ridge a wolf, slinking hungrily, sniffed first up the trail and then down, and broke the stillness of the gray night-end with a mournful howl. It did not stir Jan Thoreau.
On the day that Jean de Gravois left for Hudson's Bay, the company's supplies came in from Fort Churchill seven toboggans drawn by Eskimo dogs, laden with flour and cloth; fifty pounds of beads, ammunition, and a hundred other things to be exchanged for the furs that would soon be in London and Paris. Fearfully Jan Thoreau ran out to meet the sledges. There were seven Indians and one white man.
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