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A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Classic of American literature not only vividly narrates a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839 but also contains thought-provoking observations on literature, philosophy, Native American and Puritan histories of New England, friends, and a diversity of other topics. Of it, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "[It] is a book of wonderful merit, which is to go far and last long."

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Two Rivers Run Through His Soul
This book, written in Thoreau's younger years, conveys the exact opposite impression that The Maine Woods, which I reviewed here, does. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau has lost almost all his mystical and poetic instinct. He is, if I may put it this way, a mere Naturalist (albeit a good one). This book, even more than Walden, conveys Thoreau's youthful exuberance and intimations of another world. The only thing I can compare its finest passages to is Proust. Particularly on music, "It teaches us again and and again to trust the remotest and finest as the divinest instinct, and makes a dream our only real eaxperience." Compare this to Proust's speculation that music consists of the inhabitants of a diviner world and points us to immortality. Thoreau, again, says, "These things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of another and purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are wafted over to us."-Moreover, the book is fun and Thoreau is still full of impish mischief, as exemplified when a man asks him if he is a PROTESTANT, and Thoreau, after thinking over the true meaning of the word, assures him that he is!-This is a fun and, moreover, ethereal book which all Walden lovers must read.-I'm not sure what happened to Thoreau in his later years, when he wrote in his journal, "This is the vilest world I've ever lived in."-But never mind this later melancholy for now, take a romp down a couple rivers and enthuse yourselves with calls from another, "purer" world! --Reviewer: DANIEL MYERS from Greenville, SC USA