The Evening Post reviews A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:
[Thoreau is] a man of contemplative turn of mind, deeply imbued with German reading, so much so as to have given his reflections a German caste, but not unversed in other literature. He conducts his readers through a maze of reflections of almost desultory nature, often as agreeable as they are quaint, and sometimes running into a certain mysticism through which we do not always find it easy to follow him.
(Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 182 (Winter 1988):4)