Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 June 1901 — Thoreau’s Sensitiveness to Nature. [ARTICLE]

Thoreau’s Sensitiveness to Nature.

Thoreau’s stoic virtues withal never dulled his sense of awe, and his long years of observation never lessened his feeling of strangeness in the presence of solitary nature, says Paul Elmer More in the Atlantic. If at times his writing descends into the cataloguing style of the ordinary naturalist, yet the old tradition of wonder was too strong In him to be more than temporarily obscured. Unfortunately his occasional faults have become in some of his recent imitators the staple of their talent; but Thoreau was pre-em-inently the poet and philosopher of his school, and I cannot do better than close these desultory notes with the quotation of a passage which seems to me to convey most vividly his sensitiveness to the solemn mystery of the deep forest “We heard,” he writes in his Obesuncook, “come faintly echoing, or creeping from afar, through the moss-clad aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound, with a solid core to It yet as If half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and funguslike forest like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there, no mortal had heard it When we asked Joe (the Indian guide) in a whisper what It was, he answered: Tree fall”’