Thoreau belongs completely to the later period: he is as thoroughly of American soil as even Mark Twain or Lincoln or Whitman. While Longfellow and Lowell, Taylor and Aldrich, and the rest of their school were looking eagerly to Europe, Thoreau was completely engrossed with his own land. "No truer American ever existed than Thoreau," wrote Emerson in his essay. "His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversion from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt.... He wished to go to Oregon, not to London." It was this new-worldness, this freshness, this originality that made him the man of the new era. He went always to the sources; his work is redolent at every point of American soil. His images, his illustrations, his subject matter, all are American. His style, after he had outgrown an early fondness for Carlyle, is peculiarly his own, wonderfully simple and limpid and individual. Often it flows like poetry: The sun is near setting away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland, and over all the snowclad landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light. I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance and the melodious hooting of an owl.--December 9, 1856. And what is this but poetry? On the morning when the wild geese go over, I, too, feel the migratory instinct strong within me, and anticipate the breaking up of winter. If I yielded to this impulse, it would surely guide me to summer haunts. This indefinite restlessness and fluttering on the perch no doubt prophesy the final migration of souls out of nature to a serener summer, in long harrows and waving lines, in the spring weather, over that fair uplands and fertile Elysian meadows, winging their way at evening, and seeking a resting place with loud cackling and uproar.--January 29, 1859.