bruise or blight to adjacent weeds or roots. His strong pantheistic faith, no less than his poetic sentiment, fostered this tenderness for grasses, birds and animals. As years passed, he became a vegetarian in general diet, though he was never wholly ascetic in this regard. Here as elsewhere, the poet incited the human impulses. His chief objection to animal food was because of its bestial, coarse suggestions; "it offended his imagination." After the months at Walden, in close companionship with bird and fish, he wrote,—"I cannot fish without failing a little in self-respect." In "The Maine Woods," his memory lingers sadly over "the murder" of the moose, and his share in this adventure affected the pleasure of his trip and called forth a confession that, for weeks after, his nature resented this lapse into coarseness. To make his life in accord with nature, he must be kind to all her offspring. One of his latest interviews, only a few days before his death, was with a party of boys who had been robbing birds' nests. He touched their deepest feelings, even to tears, as he described the "wail of sorrow and anguish" which they had caused to their "little brothers of the air," to borrow the poetic phrase of a later ornithologist.
Mr. Salt, in his biography of Thoreau, has dis-
