"'T was a sweet music
Wafted them by,
I could not tell
If afar off or nigh.
"Unless I dreamed it
This was of yore;
I never told it
To mortal before.
"Never remembered
But in my dreams,
What to me waking
A miracle seems."
It seems to have been the habit of Thoreau, in writing verse, to compose a couplet, a quatrain, or other short metrical expression, copy it in his journal, and afterward, when these verses had grown to a considerable number, to arrange them in the form of a single piece. This gives to his poems the epigrammatic air which most of them have. After he was thirty years old, he wrote scarcely any verse, and he even destroyed much that he had previously written, following in this the judgment of Mr. Emerson, rather than his own, as he told me one day during his last illness. He had read all that was best in English and in Greek poetry, but was more familiar with the English poets of Milton's time and earlier, than with those more recent, except his own townsmen and companions. He valued Milton above Shakespeare, and had a special love for Æschylus, two of whose tragedies he translated. He had read Pindar, Simonides, and the Greek Anthology, and wrote, at his best, as well as the finest of the Greek lyric poets. Even Emerson, who was a severe critic of his verses, says, "His classic poem on 'Smoke' suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." Indeed, what Greek would not be proud to claim this fragment as his own?
"Light winged smoke, Icarian bird!
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,—
. . . .
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame."
No complete collection of Thoreau's poems has ever been made. Amid much that is harsh and crude, such a book would contain many verses sure to survive for centuries.
As a moralist, the bent of Thoreau is more clearly seen by most readers; and on this side, too, he was early and strongly charged. In a college essay of 1837 are these sentences:—
"Truth neither exalteth nor humbleth herself. She is not too high for the low, nor yet too low for the high. She is persuasive, not litigious, leaving conscience to decide. She never sacrificeth her dignity that she may secure for herself a favorable reception. It is not a characteristic of Truth to use men tenderly; nor is she overanxious about appearances."
In another essay of the same year he wrote:—