_Nor should it be forgotten that Thoreau was always regarded as a poet by those who were associated with him. ‘Poet-Naturalist’ was the suggestive title which Ellery Channing applied to him; and Hawthorne remarked that ‘his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them.’ Even Emerson’s final estimate was far from unappreciative. ‘His poetry,’ he wrote in his biographical sketch, ‘might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill, but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. His own verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure--is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent.’_ _Perhaps what Thoreau said of Quarles, one of that school of gnomic poets of which he was a student, might be aptly applied to himself: ‘It is rare to find one who was so much of a poet and so little of an artist. Hopelessly quaint, he never doubts his genius; it is only he and his God in all the world. He uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespeare; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of rough, crooked timber.’ The affinity of Thoreau’s style to that of Herbert, Donne, Cowley, and other minor Elizabethans, has often been remarked; and it has been truly said that the stanzas ‘Sic Vita’ might almost have a niche in Herbert’s_ Temple. _It must be granted, then, that Thoreau, whatever his limitations, had the poet’s vision, and sometimes the poet’s divine faculty; and if this was manifested more frequently in his masterly prose, it was neither absent from his verse nor from the whole tenor of his character. It was his destiny to be one of the greatest prose writers whom America has produced, and he had a strong, perhaps an exaggerated, sense of the dignity of this calling. ‘Great prose,’ he thinks, ‘of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered, like a Roman, and settled colonies.’_ _If, therefore, we cannot unreservedly place Thoreau among the poetical brotherhood, we may at least recognise that he was a poet in the larger sense in which his friends so regarded him--he felt, thought, acted, and lived as a poet, though he did not always write as one. In his own words_-- ‘_My life has been the poem I would have writ,_ _But I could not both live and utter it._’