ces everywhere is the gift of genius,
but to see a resemblance to volcanoes in the hubs or gnarls on birch
or beech trees, or cathedral windows in the dead leaves of the
andromeda in January, or a suggestion of Teneriffe in a stone-heap,
does not indicate genius. To see the great in the little, or the whole
of Nature in any of her parts, is the poet's gift, but to ask, after
seeing the andropogon grass, "Are there no purple reflections from the
culms of thought in my mind?"--a remark which Channing quotes as very
significant--is not to be poetical. Thoreau is full of these
impossible and fantastic comparisons, thinking only of striking
expressions and not at all about the truth. "The flowing of the sap
under the dull rind of the trees" is suggestive, but what suggestion
is there in the remark, "May I ever be in as good spirits as a
willow"? The mood of the scrub oak was more habitual with him.

Thoreau was in no sense an interpreter of nature; he did not draw out
its meanings or seize upon and develop its more significant phases.
Seldom does he relate what he sees or thinks to the universal human
heart and mind. He has rare power of description, but is very limited
in his power to translate the facts and movements of nature into human
emotion. His passage on the northern lights, which Channing quotes
from the Journals, is a good sample of his failure in this respect:

Now the fire in the north increases wonderfully, not
shooting up so much as creeping along, like a fire on the
mountains of the north seen afar in the night. The
Hyperborean gods are burning brush, and it spread, and all
the hoes in heaven couldn't stop it. It spread from west to
east over the crescent hill. Like a vast fiery worm it lay
across the northern sky, broken into many pieces; and each
piece, with rainbow colors skirting it, strove to advance
itself toward the east, worm-like, on its own annular
muscles. It has spread into their choicest wood-lots. Now it
shoots up like a single solitary watch-fire or burning bush,
or where it ran up a pine tree like powder, and still it
continues to gleam here and there like a fat stump in the
burning, and is reflected in the water. And now I see the
gods by great exertions have got it under, and the stars
have come out without fear, in peace.

I get no impression of the mysterious almost supernatural character of
the aurora from