"I carried them immediately to Mr. Agassiz, who was highly delighted with them. Some of the species he had seen before, but never in so fresh condition. Others, as the breams and the pout, he had seen only in spirits, and the little turtle he knew only from the books. I am sure you would have felt fully repaid for your trouble, if you could have seen the eager satisfaction with which he surveyed each fin and scale. He said the small mud-turtle was really a very rare species, quite distinct from the snapping-turtle. The breams and pout seemed to please the Professor very much. He would gladly come up to Concord to make a spearing excursion, as you suggested, but is drawn off by numerous and pressing engagements."
On the 27th of May, Thoreau's correspondent says:—
"Mr. Agassiz was very much surprised and pleased at the extent of the collections you sent during his absence; the little fox he has established in comfortable quarters in his backyard, where he is doing well. Among the fishes you sent there is one, probably two, new species."
June 1st, in other collections, other new species were discovered, much to Agassiz's delight, who never failed afterward to cultivate Thoreau's society when he could. But the poet avoided the man of science, having no love for dissection; though he recognized in Agassiz the qualities that gave him so much distinction.
The paper on "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods," which Horace Greeley bought "at a Jew's bargain," and sold to a publisher for seventy-five dollars, was the journal of a visit made to the highest mountain of Maine during Thoreau's second summer at Walden. An aunt of his had married in Bangor, Maine, and her daughters had again married there, so that the young forester of Concord had kinsmen on the Penobscot, engaged in converting the Maine forests into pine lumber. At the end of August, in 1846, while his Carlyle manuscript was passing from Greeley to Griswold, from Griswold to Graham, and from Graham to the Philadelphia type-setters, Thoreau himself was on his way from Boston to Bangor; and on the first day of September he started with his cousin from Bangor, to explore the upper waters of the Penobscot and climb the summit of Ktaadn. The forest region about this mountain had been explored in 1837 by Dr. Jackson, the State Geologist, a brother-in-law of Mr. Emerson; but no poet before Thoreau had visited these solitudes and described his experiences there. James Russell Lowell did so a few years later, and, early in the century, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Emerson had tested the solitude of the Maine woods, and written about them. The verses of Emerson, describing his own experiences there (not so well known as they should be), are often thought to imply Thoreau, though they were written before Emerson had known his younger friend, whose after adventures they portray with felicity.
"In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers' gang,
Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;
He trod the unplanted forest-floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;
Where feeds the moose and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born heads,
And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.
He heard, when in the grove, at intervals
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,—
One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green century.
. . . .
Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,
He roamed, content alike with man and beast,
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,
So long he roved at will the boundless shade."
Thus much is a picture of the Maine forests, and may have been suggested in part by the woodland life of Dr. Jackson there while surveying the State. But what follows is the brave proclamation of the poet, for himself and his heroes, among whom Thoreau and John Brown must be counted, since it declares their creed and practice,—while in the last couplet the whole inner doctrine of Transcendentalism is set forth:—
"The timid it concerns to ask their way,
And fear what foes in caves and swamps can stray,
To make no step until the event is known,
And ills to come as evils past bemoan.
Not so the wise: no timid watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;
Go where he will the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road,
By God's own light illumined and foreshowed."
Thoreau may have heard these verses read by their author in his study, before he set forth on his first journey to Maine in 1838; they were first published in the "Dial" in October, 1840, but are omitted, for some reason, in a partial edition of Emerson's Poems (in 1876). He never complied with this description so far as to spend three months in the Maine woods, even in the three campaigns which he made there (in 1846, in 1853, and in 1857), for in none of these did he occupy three weeks, and in all but little more than a month. His account of them, as now published, makes a volume by itself, which his friend Channing edited two years after Thoreau's death, and which contains the fullest record of his studies of the American Indian. It was his purpose to develop these studies into a book concerning the Indian, and for this purpose he made endless readings in the Jesuit Fathers, in books of travel, and in all the available literature of the subject. But the papers he had thus collected were not left in such form that they could be published; and so much of his untiring diligence seems now lost, almost thrown away. Doubtless his friends and editors, upon call, will one day print detached portions of these studies, from entries in his journals, and from his commonplace books.
In his explorations of Concord and its vicinity, as well as in those longer foot-journeys which he took among the mountains and along the sea-shore of New England, from 1838 to 1860, Thoreau's habits were those of an experienced hunter, though he seldom used a gun in his years of manhood. Upon this point he says in "Walden":—