However, in this case my pains were their
reward." Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of
intense, long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist
enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled from his note
books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not
even Lowell the "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.
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