In this same first volume are found the two sonnets, "Smoke" and "Haze," which were published earlier in The Dial in April, 1843. The former, which is placed by Mr. Stedman in his "American Anthology," represents lofty, poised imagination as well as skilful structure. It was considered a prophetic note of a young American sonnetteer. Like much of Thoreau's work in verse and prose, the full cadence of this poem can only be appreciated when read aloud;—
"Light-winged Smoke! Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame."
It has been stated that Thoreau, at inspired moments, wrote detached stanzas and committed them to his journal in varied contexts and afterwards combined them into complete poems. There is proof of this method in some of his earlier work. A loss of coherency sometimes results when the stanza, in "A Week," is taken from its contiguous prose and refitted into a complete poem. In addition to unrelated metrical stanzas, there are dis-
