nd Fields.

Cape Cod is photographed at last, for Thoreau has been there. Day by
day, with his stout pedestrian shoes, he plodded along that level
beach,--the eternal ocean on one side, and human existence reduced to
its simplest elements on the other,--and he pitilessly weighing each.
His mental processes never impress one with opulence and luxuriance, but
rather with a certain sublime tenacity, which extracts nutriment from
the most barren soil. He is therefore admirably matched against Cape
Cod; and though his books on softer aspects of Nature may have a
mellower charm, there is none in which the very absence of mellowness
can so well pass for an added merit.

No doubt there are passages which err upon the side of bareness. Cape
Cod itself certainly errs that way, and so often does our author; and
when they are combined, the result of desiccation is sometimes
astounding. But so much the truer the picture. If Vedder's "Lair of the
Sea-Serpent" had the rank verdure of the "Heart of the Andes," the
kraken would still be as unimpressive on canvas as in the newspapers. No
one ever dared to exhibit Cape Cod "long, and lank, and brown" enough
before, and hence the value of the book. For those who insist on
_chlorophylle_, is there not "Azarian"? If the dear public will tolerate
neither the presence of color in a picture, nor its absence, it is hard
to suit.

Yet it is worth remembering, that Thoreau's one perfect poem,--and one
of the most perfect in American literature,--"My life is like a stroll
upon the beach," must have been suggested by Cape Cod or some kindred
locality. And it is not the savage grandeur of the sea alone, but its
delicate loveliness and its ever-budding life, which will be found
recorded forever in some of these wondrous pages, intermixed with the
statistics of fish-flakes and the annals of old men's diseases.

But in his stern realism, the author employs what he himself calls
"Panurgic" plainness of speech, and deals with the horrors of the
sea-shore as composedly as with its pearls. His descriptions of the
memorials of shipwrecks, for instance, would be simply repulsive, but
that his very dryness has a sort of disinfectant quality, like the air
of California, where things the most loathsome may lie around us without
making the air impure.

He shows his wonted formidable accuracy all through these pages, and the
critic feels a sense of bewildered exultation in detecting him even in a
slip of the