Thoreau lived on the cusp of the field of scientific philosophy. Using nature as his thick, fat prop, Thoreau in his journals often sought to draw out the rationality of nature in vignettes. In this, he had ancestors in the likes of New England thinkers such as the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards. These Puritan intellectual forefathers - far from the dour moralists the Romantic Age colored them as - were purveyors of the divine in the natural in simple and telling prose and conversations. Thoreau, in a far more scientifically-organized time, persisted in this activity, and sought to be a living example of the thinner, more openly religious deist tradition. He added fatness to prose and thoughts where Edwards or Cotton Mather insisted on the thin and clear.
As such, Thoreau often walked into the very "Romantic" appreciation of nature much more than he ever intended. Whether just lonely - or more probably, a typical Romantic period product like his contemporary, Salem native Nathaniel Hawthorne - or a scientist without portfolio, Thoreau took the time to paint nature pictures in prose. As I mentioned in other articles, Thoreau was a "scientist/artist" (or artist/scientist and poet) and this is not my original observation - but that of the late, brilliant artist/scientist (and poet), Loren Eiseley. For who else but an artist / scientist would say of the Bluebird, "the bluebird carries the sky on his back? "
Thoreau, too, was a poet. He was also an accidental creator of pacifistic political action called "civil disobedience": the passive rejection of governmental or other power-imposed action deemed abusive as pressed on the common man - whether by law or public opinion. In such a light, Thoreau is more of a political fighter than he was ever deemed when alive. Such thinking deeply imbued Ghandi and Martin Luther King in the idea that proactive protest using no violence could overcome deep seated prejudices, for one. Another near contemporary of Thoreau's - Henry Adams (of the presidential Adamses, such as John Quincy Adams) once stated (in effect) "who knows where a teacher's influence reaches?" Thoreau - as silent, unwitting teacher - effected the thinking of two of the greatest political reformers in history. It caused massive political change, mostly for the better.
