_Henry David Thoreau._--Emerson had the originality that enables a seer to pierce beneath the surface, and to find a likeness in things where passive minds detect no brotherhood; he did not have the originality by virtue of which amply creative minds gather a multitude of elements, properly subordinated one to another, into new, harmonious, and embracing wholes. His is a crucial defect in American poetry, a defect in the constructive imagination. This defect is intimately associated with an unscholarly dread of minute research. Emerson’s attitude of distrust toward science was shared by his friend and disciple Thoreau (1817-62), in whom the creed of individualism ran almost to the point of caricature. In his youth and prime, Thoreau wrote a great deal of verse, only a little of which has been preserved. The conception of Prometheus, suffering and isolated friend of humanity, tenacious in the assertion of his own will, was to Thoreau’s taste; hence his rough but stirring translation from the tragedy by Æschylus. He had the Emersonian fondness for gnomic sentences and verses, such as he found scattered through the “Odes” of Pindar. His versions of Pindaric gnomes show that he was not afraid of difficult Greek; still, he hovered between belief and disbelief in scholarship. His ear was better than Emerson’s. It is unfortunate that his unrivalled gift of observation did not more frequently leave a record of itself in lines like those “To a Stray Fowl.” His mind was not without the New England love of the startling and paradoxical. Yet his search for hidden analogies borders oftener on true imagination than was the case with Holmes.