We have not yet been able to give this volume such an examination as would justify us in pronouncing absolute judgment upon it. For its amiable author, we have much respect. His mode of life is sui generis—all alone by himself in the woods of Concord, an enthusiastic child and lover of Nature, in spirit an occupant of an ideal world, and with the eye of genius ‘in a fine phrenzy rolling’—and this production of his is equally peculiar. We have spent many years ‘on the Merrimack river,’ our dear, native stream; but this was ‘long, long age.’ We shall accept this invitation of Mr. Thoreau to pass ‘a week’ with him on the same river, and, making that the starting-point from which to ascent to ‘cloud-land,’ we shall accompany him on the wings of imagination as far as we can sustain such a flight. Of our entertainment and success, we may report hereafter.

  The numerous admirers of [Thomas] Carlyle and [Ralph Waldo] Emerson will read this book with a relish; for Mr. T. writes in their vein, and to some extent in their dialect, and is a match for them in felicitous conceits and amusing quaintnesses; yet he is not a servile imitator—only an admirer, by affinity and kindred one of a trinity, having his own sphere in which to move, and his own mission to consummate. As a specimen of his thinking and speaking, take the following, suggested by a grave-yard:

  It is remarkable that the dead lie every where under stones,— . . . ‘Having reached the term of his natural life;’—would it not be truer to say, Having reached the term of his unnatural life?