He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore.  “After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.  None of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths.  I had seen the red election-birds brought from their recesses on my comrade’s string, and fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest.  Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet’s string.”

It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism.  Mysticism has been defined as the soul’s recognition of its identity with nature.  This thought lies plainly in Schelling’s philosophy, and he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet.  Mind and nature are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet.  In man, the Absolute—­that is, God—­becomes conscious of himself; makes of himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind.  “The souls of men,” said Schelling, “are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our infinite World-Spirit beholds himself.”  This thought is also clearly present in Emerson’s view of nature, and has caused him to be accused of pantheism.  But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the transcendentalists was a pantheist.  In their view nature was divine.  Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality which abides beyond the phenomena.  Thus in Emerson’s Two Rivers: 

  “Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,[1]
    Repeats the music of the rain,
  But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
    Through thee as thou through Concord plain.

  “Thou in thy narrow banks art pent;
    The stream I love unbounded goes;
  Through flood and sea and firmament,
    Through light, through life, it forward flows.

  “I see the inundation sweet,
    I hear the spending of the stream,
  Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
    Through passion, thought, through power and dream.”

This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau.  The hard world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in it—­sees God.  “This earth,” he cries, “which is spread out like a map around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed.”  “In me is the sucker that I see;” and, of Walden Pond,

  “I am its stony shore,
    And the breeze that passes o’er.”