It is a medley of prose and verse, of homely common-sense and lofty speculation. Side by side with realistic portraits of plain people, farmers, fishermen, boatmen, and lock-keepers, are minute and exquisite descriptions of the life of field, mountain, stream, lake, and air. The literary allusions are many, and taken from sources as wide apart as the poles, Shattuck (the historian of Concord) and Anacreon, Gookin and Chaucer. Here is to be found the famous essay on Friendship, the spirit of which may be partly divined from this sentence: ‘I could tame a hyena more easily than my friend.’ The poetry in the volume is a stumbling-block to not a few readers. Doubtless it has its virtues, but too often Thoreau’s poetry must be forgiven for the sake of his prose. The stiff, almost self-conscious air of _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack_ and the hobbling verse help to explain the indifference of the author’s contemporaries to a very original work. _Walden_, the second of Thoreau’s books, is the better of the two, which does not mean that the first could be spared. The style is easier, the flavor more racy, the spirit more humorous. The attitude of the writer is characteristically provoking and pugnacious. The chapters abound in audacities which at once pique and delight the reader. This modern Diogenes-Crusoe, solving the problem of existence on an improvised desert-island two miles from his mother’s door-step, is a refreshing figure. Life in the woods fascinated Thoreau. _Walden_ is a tribute to this fascination. In the absence of domestic sounds he had the murmur of the forest, the cry of the loon, the ‘tronk’ of the frog, and the clangor of the wild-goose. Society was plenty and of the best. His neighbors were the squirrel, the field-mouse, the phœbe, the blue jay. Human companionship was not wanting, for there were visitors of all sorts, from the half-witted to those who had more wits than they knew what to do with. Matter-of-fact people were amazed at the young man’s way of living, lacking the penetration to see that he might live as he did from the humor of it. When sceptics asked him whether he thought he could subsist on vegetable food alone, Thoreau, to strike at the root of the matter at once, was accustomed to say that he ‘could live on board nails.’ ‘If they cannot understand that they cannot understand much that I say.’ The Walden episode was an experiment in emancipation, and the book is a challenge to mankind to live more simply and freely. Thoreau mocks at the worship of luxury. ‘I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox-cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.’