his business instinct was shown in
that he himself tells how one year he made a thousand dollars' worth of
pencils, but was obliged to sacrifice them all to cancel a debt of one
hundred dollars.

And yet there are people who declare that genius is not transmissible.

John Thoreau failed at pencil-making, but Henry Thoreau failed because
he played the flute morning, noon and night, and went singing the
immunity of Pan. He fished, and tramped the woods and fields, looking,
listening, dreaming and thinking.

At Keswick, where the water comes down at Lodore, there is a
pencil-factory that has been there since the days of William the
Conqueror. The wife of Coleridge used to work there and get money that
supported her philosopher-husband and their children. Southey lived
near, and became Poet Laureate of England through the right exercise of
Keswick pencils; Wordsworth lived only a few miles away, and once he
brought over Charles and Mary Lamb, and bought pencils for both, with
their names stamped on them. The good old man who now keeps the
pencil-factory explained these things to me, and also explained the
direct relationship of good lead-pencils to literature, but I do not
remember what it was.

If Henry Thoreau had held on a few years, until the pilgrims began to
arrive at Concord, he could have gotten rich selling souvenir pencils.
But he just dozed and dreamed and tramped and philosophized; and when he
wrote he used an eagle's quill, with ink he himself distilled from
elderberries, and at first, birch-bark sufficed for paper. "Wild men and
wild things are the only ones that have life in abundance," he used to
say.

* * * * *

Brook Farm was a serious, sober experiment inaugurated by the Reverend
George Ripley with intent to live the ideal life--the life of useful
effort, direct honesty, simplicity and high thinking.

But Thoreau could not be induced to join the community--he thought too
much of his liberty to entrust it to a committee. He was interested in
the experiment, but not enough to visit the experimenters. Emerson
looked in on them, remained one night, and went back home to continue
his essay on Idealism.

Hawthorne remained long enough to get material for his "Blithedale
Romance." Margaret Fuller secured good copy and the cordial and lifelong
dislike of Hawthorne, all through misprized love, alas! George William
Curtis and Charles Dana graduated out of Brook Farm, and wen