Thoreau writes in his journal:
For a day or two it has been quite cool, a coolness that was felt even when sitting by an open window in a thin coat on the west side of the house in the morning, and you naturally sought the sun at that hour . . . I have been to Tarbell’s Swamp by the Second Division this afternoon, and to the Marlborough road . . . I hear the rain (11 P.M.) distilling upon the ground, wetting the grass and leaves
Boston, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal:
Thoreau has the profoundest passion for the aboriginal in Nature of any man I have known; and had the sentiment of humanity been equally strong and tender he might have written pastorals that Virgil and Theocritus would have envied him the authorship of. As it is, he has come nearer the primitive simplicity of the antique than any of our poets, and touched the fields and forests and streams of Concord with a classic interest that can never fade.
The lines “Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy” are suffused with a sweet elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the loss of their foraging friend and essayed to sing their grief in their murmuring leaves. So the essay on “Friendship” wears a sylvan sympathetic manner, and carries a heart of oak in its bosom—so brave, so self-helpful, so defiant, and yet so sternly kind and wholesome in its counsels. No man lives in so close a companionship and so constant with Nature, or breathes more of the spirit of pure poetry. And in this lies his excellence; for when the heart is divorced from Nature, from the society of living, moving things, poetry has fled, and the love that sings.
(The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 253)
