40 
strong personality ; he was one of the few who were strong 
enough to impress Emerson. In some respects he was the 
concrete expression of Emerson’s ideals. Instinctively Thoreau 
is in accord with thisschool of thought, for his nature 1s dead-set 
against the shams and follies of his age ; but he is opposed to 
many of the enthusiasts in that he insists, if reformation be 
made at all, it must be made by the individual, as against the 
co-operative, method. 
Emerson, who saw much of him, wrote: ‘‘ Thoreau is with 
difficulty sweet,” and again: “‘ There isa constitutional No! 
in him.” “ He is a protestant a l’outrance.”’ Thoreau’s out- 
spoken words hurt his friends, when they were not in accord with 
his ideals or practices, but they loved him dearly notwithstand- 
ing his faults. Emerson says of him that his “chilling silences’’ 
were oft-times worse and harder to bear than his words, and 
there Thoreau translated his own epigram, ‘‘speech is fractional, 
silence is integral.” 
Thoreau, growing in spiritual thought, is impelled conscien- 
tiously to put into practice, to test, a long cherished ideal— 
to withdraw into the woods. So in 1845, in order the more to 
purify mind and body, which to him are one (and similarly life 
and thought should be one) he takes up his abode on a “ lot” 
by Walden pond side, where he has built him a wooden house. 
It is to be a probationary period with him, whereby he shall so 
resolve himself that he will morally, spiritually, intellectually 
and bodily be the purer and healthier. In his ‘‘ Walden” he 
says, ‘‘ My purpose in going to Walden pond was not to live 
cheaply, nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private 
business with the fewest obstacles. I went to the woods 
because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essen- 
tial facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, 
and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. 
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to 
live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was 
not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life 
into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved 
to be mean, to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and 
publish its meanness to the world ; or, if it were sublime, to 
know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it 
in my next excursion.” His ‘‘ excursions ”’ were the published 
accounts or essays descriptive of his walking tours. 
Notwithstanding this clear pronouncement, his purpose has 
been misunderstood. Thoreau is frugal naturally—there is no 
asceticism in him—in fact he was just the reverse where he felt 
that anything was good for him. There was nothing of the 
