The beauty that Thoreau reveals in the dispersion of seeds and forest succession is neither the romantic's "visionary gleam" nor the theologian's "design." It is the beauty of indirection--of determining by the numbers of redpolls and goldfinches whether there is a good crop of birch seeds, of reckoning that a straight line of Alder corresponds to some bygone high-water mark, and that the
fuller's thistle growing along the Concord river shore was "planted" by the fulling mills at Lowell, many miles upstream.