Poetic, insightful, gentle, powerful. Well written and rightfully beloved as both an American and a spiritual masterpiece.

Thoreau gets a bit long-winded at times over such things as his descriptions of ice, and mud flows. (The latter of which being the only section of Walden that was a bit lost on me.)In fact, he is at his best when pursuing and exploring metaphor and spiritual truth, and takes a few steps towards tedium in the sections that merely describe what he was looking at.

Even those sections, however, were written with a mostly golden pen. The magnitude of Thoreau's patient, penetrating observations during his time on Walden is indisputable.

Those few slight slogs notwithstanding, the short volume radiates with potentially life-changing thoughts of such depth as to make Walden Pond itself seem shallow by comparison.