his mind was always honest. He had an
instinct for the truth, and while we may admit that the truth he
was in quest of in nature was not always scientific truth, or the
truth of natural history, but was often the truth of the poet and
the mystic, yet he was very careful about his facts; he liked to
be able to make an exact statement, to clinch his observations by
going again and again to the spot. He never taxes your credulity.
He had never been bitten by the mad dog of sensationalism that
has bitten certain of our later nature writers.

Thoreau made no effort to humanize the animals. What he aimed
mainly to do was to invest his account of them with literary
charm, not by imputing to them impossible things, but by
describing them in a way impossible to a less poetic nature. The
novel and the surprising are not in the act of the bird or beast
itself, but in Thoreau's way of telling what it did. To draw upon
your imagination for your facts is one thing; to draw upon your
imagination in describing what you see is quite another. The new
school of nature writers will afford many samples of the former
method; read Thoreau's description of the wood thrush's song or
the bobolink's song, or his account of wild apples, or of his
life at Walden Pond, or almost any other bit of his writing, for
a sample of the latter. In his best work he uses language in the
imaginative way of the poet.

Literature and science do not differ in matters of fact, but in
spirit and method. There is no live literature without a play of
personality, and there is no exact science without the clear,
white light of the understanding. What we want, and have a right
to expect, of the literary naturalist is that his statement shall
have both truth and charm, but we do not want the charm at the
expense of the truth. I may invest the commonest fact I observe
in the fields or by the roadside with the air of romance, if I
can, but I am not to put the romance in place of the fact. If you
romance about the animals, you must do so unequivocally, as
Kipling does and as AEsop did; the fiction must declare itself at
once, or the work is vicious. To make literature out of natural
history observation is not to pervert or distort the facts, or to
draw the long bow at all; it is to see the facts in their true
relations and proportions and with honest emotion.

Truth of seeing and truth of feeling are the main requisite: add
truth of style, and the thing is done.