pen,--as when in the note on page 228 he gives to the town
of Rockport, on Cape Ann, the erroneous name of Rockland. After this
discovery, one may dare to wonder at his finding a novelty in the
"Upland Plover," and naming it among the birds not heard in the interior
of the State, when he might be supposed to have observed it, in summer,
near Mount Wachusett, where its wail adds so much, by day or night, to
the wildness of the scenery. Yet by the triviality of these our
criticisms one may measure the astonishing excellence of his books.

This wondrous eye and hand have passed away, and left no equal and no
second. Everything which Thoreau wrote has this peculiar value, that no
other observing powers were like his; no one else so laboriously
verified and exhausted the facts; and no other mind rose from them, at
will, into so subtile an air of meditation,--meditation too daring to be
called devout, by church or world, yet too pure and lofty to merit any
lower name. Lycidas has died once more, and has not left his peer.

Cape Cod does not change in its traits, but only in its boundaries, and
this book will stand for it, a century hence, as it now does. It is the
Cape Odyssey. Near the end, moreover, there is a remarkable chapter on
previous explorers, which shows, by its patient thoroughness, and by the
fearless way in which the author establishes facts which had eluded
Hildreth and Bancroft, that, had he chosen history for his vocation, he
could have extracted its marrow as faithfully as that of his more
customary themes. Yet the grand ocean-pictures which this book contains
remind us that it was the domain of external Nature which was his
peculiar province; and this sublime monotone of the surges seems his
fitting dirge, now that--to use the fine symbol of one who was his
comrade on this very excursion--his bark has "sunk to another sea."

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Essays on Social Subjects. From the "Saturday Review." Boston. Ticknor &
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History of the Anti-Slavery Measures of the Thirty-Seventh and
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The Complete Works of the Most Reverend John Hughes, D. D., Archbishop
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