"Almost every New England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were more boundless than even those of the savage. Perhaps I have owed to fishing and hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which, otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets, even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them.... I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. I have long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I am now inclined to think there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.... We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected."
Emerson mentions that Thoreau preferred his spy-glass to his gun to bring the bird nearer to his eye, and says also of his patience in out-door observation:—
"He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits,—nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him."
And I have thought that Emerson had Thoreau in mind when he described his "Forester":—
"He took the color of his vest
From rabbit's coat or grouse's breast;
For as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,
So walks the woodman unespied."
The same friend said of him:—
"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants;[12] in his pocket his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or squirrel's nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller records of Butler the apiologist, 'that either he had told the bees things, or the bees had told him.' Snakes coiled round his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he played out the game in the mild form of botany and ichthyology. His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses; he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. Every fact lay in order and glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole."
It was this poetic and coördinating vision of the natural world which distinguished Thoreau from the swarm of naturalists, and raised him to the rank of a philosopher even in his tedious daily observations. Channing, no less than Emerson, has observed and noted this trait, giving to his friend the exact title of "poet-naturalist," and also, in his poem, "The Wanderer," bestowing on him the queer name of Idolon, which he thus explains:—
"So strangely was the general current mixed
With his vexed native blood in its crank wit,
That as a mirror shone the common world
To this observing youth,—whom noting, thence
I called Idolon,—ever firm to mark
Swiftly reflected in himself the Whole."
In an earlier poem Channing had called him "Rudolpho," and had thus portrayed his daily and nightly habits of observation:—