Doubtless the wildest man New England has turned out since the red aborigines vacated her territory was Henry Thoreau,--a man in whom the Indian reappeared on the plane of taste and morals. One is tempted to apply to him his own lines on “Elisha Dugan,” as it is very certain they fit himself much more closely than they ever did his neighbor:-- “O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits, Who hast no cares. Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone Close to the bone, And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest.” His whole life was a search for the wild, not only in nature but in literature, in life, in morals. The shyest and most elusive thoughts and impressions were the ones that fascinated him most, not only in his own mind, but in the minds of others. His startling paradoxes are only one form his wildness took. He cared little for science, except as it escaped the rules and technicalities, and put him on the trail of the ideal, the transcendental. Thoreau was of French extraction; and every drop of his blood seems to have turned toward the aboriginal, as the French blood has so often done in other ways in this country. He, for the most part, despised the white man; but his enthusiasm kindled at the mention of the Indian. He envied the Indian; he coveted his knowledge, his arts, his woodcraft. He accredited him with a more “practical and vital science” than was contained in the books. “The Indian stood nearer to wild Nature than we.” “It was a new light when my guide gave me Indian names for things for which I had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view.” And again, “The Indian’s earthly life was as far off from us as Heaven is.” In his “Week” he complains that our poetry is only white man’s poetry. “If we could listen for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.” Speaking of himself, he says, “I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom, but accuracy, as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.” Again and again he returns to the Indian. “We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.” “We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse