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Alliteration occurs below as well:

For this is the secret of successful sauntering.

In the sentence below, Thoreau uses not only alliteration, but a metaphor, comparing the saunterer to a meandering river, a pleasant image:

but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.

Thoreau continually employs positive metaphors and allusions, as he compares walkers to medieval knights and alludes to medieval chivalry. He even directly alludes to Chaucer's "The Gest of Robyn Hode" when he quotes: " "It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn, That I was last here..."

A light-hearted, humorous tone that draws the reader in is created through use of imagery and hyperbole, as in below, when Thoreau states that serious walkers should be:

prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.

An embalmed heart is an image we can imagine, while the idea that we would die on a walk is hyperbolic.

Another example of hyperbole is the following:

If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.

He makes a pun when he says to be walker:

You must be born into the family of the Walkers.

At the end of the piece, however, Thoreau persuades us to walk with several paragraphs of beautiful imagery about sunsets, ending with an allusion to heaven:

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn

Rhetorical devices are aspects of a text that the author employs to persuade the reader.

Thoreau employs rhetorical questions, which are questions to which the answer seems obvious or are meant to provoke the listener or reader to think. In one paragraph, he opens with one rhetorical question and uses another near the end. He begins by asking about the effects of walking only in an urban green space. Extending this idea through the paragraph, he later asks the relationship between mental status and physical location:

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?.... What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

Thoreau appeals to logos, rational thought, as he includes numerous references to scientists and historians in support of his enthusiasm for America and his advocacy of westward expansion. He provides quotations from works by Michaux, Humboldt, Guyot, Sir Francis Head, and Linnaeus.

The cited text by Head uses hyperbole, extreme exaggeration, such as in his claim that “Nature… has outlined her works on a larger scale” in the New World than in the Old World. Thoreau furthers the use of hyperbole to emphasize the extreme positivism in others’ attitudes toward America, which bolsters his own claims of American superiority and the positive effect of nature on people:

If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar.

Thoreau also employs metaphor, direct comparison of unlike things, as a rhetorical device. He states that the West about which he has been writing is the Wild, the aspect of untamed nature which is far superior to domesticated aspects such as agriculture:

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Parallelism is the repeated use of phrases or sentences that have the same or similar structure. Thoreau uses this in encouraging the reader to connect literary efforts to the praise of Nature:

He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them....