“Suddenly old Time winked at me—­ah, you know me, you rogue—­and news had come that IT was well.  That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . .  I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that ever-lasting something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves.”  It was something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature.  “The other world,” he wrote, “is all my art:  my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else.”  Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, to “examine too microscopically the universal tablet.”  He was a close observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the minuter aspects of nature.  He has had many followers, who have produced much pleasant literature on out-door life.  But in none of them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor.  He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with the fact.  The sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods was to him “as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy wilderness.”  He saw small things in cosmic relations.  His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions.  The river just above Sherman’s Bridge, in time of flood “when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows,” was like Lake Huron, “and you may run aground on Cranberry Island,” and “get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the North-west coast.”  He said that most of the phenomena described in Kane’s voyages could be observed in Concord.

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in a winter night, keen and cold and high.  It had the pale cast of thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to “hit the sense of mortal sight.”  But it was at least indigenous.  If not an American literature—­not national and not inclusive of all sides of American life—­it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true to the spirit of its section.  The tough Puritan stock had at last put forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer, came to Concord.  He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been married, and with his bride he settled down in the “Old Manse” for three paradisaical years.  A picture of this protracted honeymoon and this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of his American Note Books, posthumously published.  Hawthorne