Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice,very remarkable, but very ugly methought.

Then in these later years we have had John Muir and John Burroughs who cannot be set low, but among American writers Thoreau was the pioneer of nature-study.

Emerson had just become famous through Nature, Thoreau was then a young man quite unknown to fame.

Where the child's capacity for close observation survives into manhood, supplemented by man's power of sustained attention, we have the typical temperament of the lover of the woods, the mountains, and the wildof the naturalist in the sense that Thoreau was a naturalist, and many another whose memory is cherished.