A peripatetic philosopher, and out of doors for the best parts of his days and nights, he has manifold weather and seasons in him, and the manners of an animal of probity and virtues unstained.  Of our moralists he seems the wholesomest; and the best republican citizen in the world,—­always at home, and minding his own affairs.  Perhaps a little over-confident sometimes, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of friendship, there is in him an integrity and sense of justice that make possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics, and all the more welcome to us in these times of shuffling and of pusillanimity.  Plutarch would have made him immortal in his pages, had he lived before his day.  Nor have we any so modern as be,—­his own and ours; too purely so to be appreciated at once.  A scholar by birthright, and an author, his fame has not yet travelled far from the banks of the rivers he has described in his books; but I hazard only the truth in affirming of his prose, that in substance and sense it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time, and that he is sure of a reading in the future.  There are fairer fishes in his pages than any now swimming in our streams, and some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt never rivalled; a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music, and a greyhound that was meant for Adonis; some frogs, too, better than any of Aristophanes.  Perhaps we have had no eyes like his since Pliny’s time.  His senses seem double, giving him access to secrets not easily read by other men:  his sagacity resembling that of the beaver and the bee, the dog and the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by some other or seventh sense, dealing with objects as if they were shooting forth from his own mind mythologically, thus completing Nature all round to his senses, and a creation of his at the moment.  I am sure he knows the animals, one by one, and everything else knowable in our town, and has named them rightly as Adam did in Paradise, if he be not that ancestor himself.  His works are pieces of exquisite sense, celebrations of Nature’s virginity, exemplified by rare learning and original observations.  Persistently independent and manly, he criticizes men and times largely, urging and defending his opinions with the spirit and pertinacity befitting a descendant of him of the Hammer.  A head of mixed genealogy like his, Franco-Norman crossed by Scottish and New-England descent, may be forgiven a few characteristic peculiarities and trenchant traits of thinking, amidst his great common sense and fidelity to the core of natural things.  Seldom has a head circumscribed so much of the sense of Cosmos as this footed intelligence,—­nothing less than all out-of-doors sufficing his genius and scopes, and, day by day, through all weeks and seasons, the year round.