we will observe this youth
and write anecdotes about him, for he is going to be a great man." The
very few in his class who remembered him wrote their reminiscences long
years afterward, with memories refreshed by magazine accounts written by
pious pilgrims from Michigan.

In college pranks and popular amusements he took no part, neither was he
a "grind," for he impressed himself on no teacher or professor so that
they opened their mouths and made prophecies.

Once safely through college, and standing on the threshold (I trust I
use the right expression), Henry Thoreau refused to accept his diploma
and pay five dollars for it--he said it wasn't worth the money.

In his "Walden," Thoreau expresses his opinion of college training this
way: "If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences I
would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the
neighborhood of some professor, where everything is professed and
practised but the art of life. To my astonishment, I was informed when I
left college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn
down the harbor I would have known more about it."

It is well to remember, however, that Thoreau had no ambitions to become
a navigator. His mission was simply to paddle his own canoe on Walden
Pond and Concord River. The men who really launched him on his voyage of
discovery were Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson--both Harvard
men. Had he not been a college man, it is quite probable he would never
have caught the speaker's eye. His efforts in working his way through
college, assisted by his poverty-stricken parents, proved his quality.
And as for his life in a shanty on the shores of Walden Pond, the
occurrence is too commonplace to mention, were it not for the fact that
the solitary occupant of the shanty was a Harvard graduate who used no
tobacco.

Harvard prepares a youth for life--but here is a man who, having
prepared for life, deliberately turns his back on life and lives in the
woods.

A genuine woodsman is no curiosity, but a civilized woodsman is. The
tendency of colleges is to turn men from Nature to books; from bonfires
to stoves, steam-heat and cash-registers; but Thoreau, by reversing all
rules, suddenly found himself, and others, explaining his position in
print.

Harvard supplied him the alternating current; he influenced the people
in his environment, and he was influenced by his environment.

But without Ha