Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’ The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude.
Charles Ives, on Henry David Thoreau [pictured], Essays Before a Sonata (1920).