red in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the
Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of
an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of
the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the
world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it.
Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
The youth replies, 'I can.'"

So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_:

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity.
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew."

The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the
poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837,
Thoreau engaged in school-teaching and in the manufacture of
lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself
to walking, reading, and the study of nature. 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 Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is
his inhumanity. Emerson spoke o