The first fact of importance about Thoreau is the fact that he wrote day after day, seldom a day omitted for years, the 6,811 closely printed pages of his journal, every part done with thoroughness and finish, with no dream that it ever was to be published. It is a fact enormously significant; it reveals to us the naked man; it furnishes a basis for all constructive criticism. "My journal," he wrote November 16, 1850, "should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for an aspect of the world, what I love to think of." And again, "Who keeps a journal is purveyor to the gods." And still again, February 8, 1841, "My journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but, in it, for the gods. They are my correspondents, to whom daily I send off this sheet, post-paid. I am clerk in their counting house, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger." He was not a poser for effect, for it is impossible for one to pose throughout 6,811 printed pages wrought for no eyes save his own and the gods. His power came rather from the fact that he did not pose; that he wrote spontaneously for the sheer love of the writing. "I think," he declares in one place, "that the one word that will explain the Shakespeare miracle is unconsciousness." The word explains also Thoreau. Again he adds, "There probably has been no more conscious age than the present." The sentence is a key: in a conscious age, a classical age building on books, watchful of conventions and precedents, Thoreau stood true only to himself and Nature. Between him and the school of Taylor and Stoddard there was the whole diameter. He was affected only by the real, by experience, by the testimony of his own soul. "The forcible writer," he wrote February 3, 1852, "stands boldly behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been _there_ in person." In his nature observations Thoreau was not a scientist. It was not his object to collect endless data for the purpose of arriving at laws and generalizations. He approached Nature rather as a poet. There was in him an innate love for the wild and elemental. He had, moreover, a passion for transcending, or peering beyond, those bounds of ordinary experience and capturing the half-divined secrets that Nature so jealously guards. His attitude was one of perpetual wonder, that wonder of the child which has produced the mythology of the race. Always was he seeking to catch Nature for an instant off her guard. His eyes were on the strain for the unseen, his ears for the unheard.