re. He was at one time
private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself
for a season by doing odd jobs in land surveying for the farmers about
Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the
banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for
two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and
he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book,
_Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac
Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield,
and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_,
_Excursions_, and a _Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a
volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, have been
given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one
has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as
Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's
text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the
simplest terms--to

"live all alone
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweet
Constantly eat."

He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion
to the type of the Red {459} Indian. The most distinctive note in
Thoreau is his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of
stoicism." "Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand."
He strove to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its
aloofness from man; to identify himself, with the moose and the
mountain. He listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice
of the earth. "What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following
upon the trail of the lumberman he asked the primeval wilderness for
its secret, and

"saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads."

He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom the meaning
of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their indifference to the
shipwrecked bodies that they rolled ashore. "After sitting in my
chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy
morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a
nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None
of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the
woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their