THE LIFE WORTH LIVING. l8l 



an idler by any means. Industry was a passion 

 with him, but it must be productive industry. 

 There is not a day when Thoreau does not re- 

 cord some useful work in his diary. He writes, 

 he works his garden, he chops down trees, he 

 helps others. The art he loved was literature. 

 He believed in good books ; his reading was 

 not particularly wide, for he hated libraries and 

 had not money wherewith to buy books. In 

 one of his diaries he recalls his indisposition to 

 go to Cambridge or Boston in order to look 

 at books in the library, and he suggests that 

 libraries should be built in the woods where 

 sensitive men might enjoy their contents with- 

 out being compelled to face the noise and dust 

 of the towns. He wrote at all times ; in the 

 evening at his desk, or during a moment's rest 

 upon a fallen log or stone. He composed as he 

 walked, the length of his walk making the 

 length of his writing. When he could not get 

 out-of-doors during the day, for one reason or 

 another, he wrote nothing; he said that houses 

 were like hospitals, and the atmosphere of them 

 enervated the mind as well as the body. His 

 great subjects, the text which he viewed on 

 all sides and was always preaching from, was the 



