Thoreau's style shows remarkable power of description. No American has surpassed him in unique description of the most varied incidents in the procession of all the seasons. We shall find frequent illustrations of this power scattered through his _Journal_:-- "_June_ 1, 1857. I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me.... He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling string ... the meadow is all bespattered with melody. His notes fall with the apple blossoms, in the orchard." Even more characteristic is an entry in his _Journal_ for June 11, 1840, where he tries to fathom the consciousness of the solitary bittern:-- "With its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, has it wrested the whole of her secret from Nature yet? It has looked out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its! What says it of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs? It would be worth while to look in the eye which has been open and seeing in such hours and in such solitudes. When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if my own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it." In this entry, which was probably never revised for publication, we note three of his characteristics: his images "fresh from the soil," adding vigor to his style; his mystic and poetic communion with nature; and the peculiar transcendental desire to pass beyond human experience and to supplement it with new revelations of the gospel of nature. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, 1804-1864 [Illustration: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE] ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS.--William Hathorne, the ancestor of America's greatest prose writer, sailed at the age of twenty-three from England on the ship _Arbella_ with John Winthrop (p. 30), and finally settled at Salem, Massachusetts. He brought with him a copy of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_, a very unusual book for the library of a New England Puritan. [Illustration: HAWTHORNES BIRTHPLACE, SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS]