Until Thoreau arrived to make acquaintance with its hard yet fascinating personality, Cape Cod remained unknown and almost unseen, though often visited and written about by tourists and students of nature. Something in the asceticism, or the directness, or the amazing keenness, of Thoreau's mind brought him into sympatnetic understanding of the thing he saw, and he interpreted the level stretches of shore with absolute fidelity. In these pages the melancholy land looks as "long, lank, and brown" as it looks lying under the gray autumn sky.