A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers contains a great many quotations, and these have been criticized as disturbing by those who find the work not much more than an interesting journal gone wrong. Even to those fond of the book it is clear that A Week has too many of them, and that occasionally so many are bunched together that the reader loses the sense of Thoreau's personality, which is always unfortunate. But the quotations with which A Week is studded, while certainly bothersome now and then, are usually pleasurable if one reads slowly, watching for the special powers and idiosyncrasies of the older styles which Thoreau loved. The contrast between his examples and the timbre of his own prose is satisfying in itself and contributes to the major concern of the whole work—the mind's proper fluidity, its rich diversity of attention when most in harmony with the spiritual laws governing insight and inspiration.