"last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more
unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished
scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest.
He had some acquaintance with several modern languages, and at one time
possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to
be found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the
seventeenth century. His critical essays in the "Dial," his letters
and the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of
rich harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand
manuscript pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and
character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies
gave him durable satisfaction. Then, too, he had deep delight in his
life-long studies in natural history, in his meticulous measurements of
river currents, in his notes upon the annual flowering of plants and the
migration of birds. The more thoroughly trained naturalists of our own
day detect him now and again in error as to his birds and plants, just
as specialists in Maine woodcraft discover that he made amusing, and for
him unaccountable, blunders when he climbed Katahdin. But if he was not
impeccable as a naturalist or woodsman, who has ever had more fun out of
his enthusiasm than Thoreau, and who has ever stimulated as many men and
women in the happy use of their eyes? He would have had slight patience
with much of the sentimental nature study of our generation, and
certainly an intellectual contempt for much that we read and write
about the call of the wild; but no reader of his books can escape his
infection for the freedom of the woods, for the stark and elemental in
nature. Thoreau's passion for this aspect of life may have been selfish,
wolflike, but it is still communicative.

Once, toward the close of his too brief life, Thoreau "signed on" again
to an American ideal, and no man could have signed more nobly. It was
the cause of Freedom, as represented by John Brown of Harper's Ferry.
The French and Scotch blood in the furtive hermit suddenly grew hot.
Instead of renouncing in disgust the "uncivil chaos called Civil
Government," Thoreau challenged it to a fight. Indeed he had already
thrown down the gauntlet in "Slavery in Massachusetts," which Garrison
had published in the "Liberator" in 1854. And now the death upon the
scaffold of the old fanatic of Ossawatomie changed Thoreau into a
c