ttainments of the class to
which Lowell belonged. Thoreau went his own way, with an air of
defiance and contempt which, no doubt, his contemporaries were more
inclined to resent than we are at our distance. Shall this man in his
hut on the shores of Walden Pond assume to lay down the law and the
gospel to his elders and betters, and pass unrebuked, no matter on
what intimate terms he claims to be with the gods of the woods and
mountains? This seems to be Lowell's spirit.

"Thoreau's experiment," says Lowell, "actually presupposed all that
complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted
on another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his
bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough,
his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the
sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that
such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." Very clever,
but what of it? Of course Thoreau was a product of the civilization he
decried. He was a product of his country and his times. He was born in
Concord and early came under the influence of Emerson; he was a
graduate of Harvard University and all his life availed himself, more
or less, of the accumulated benefits of state and social
organizations. When he took a train to Boston, or dropped a letter in,
or received one through, the post office, or read a book, or visited a
library, or looked in a newspaper, he was a sharer in these benefits.
He made no claims to living independently of the rest of mankind. His
only aim in his Walden experiment was to reduce life to its lowest
terms, to drive it into a corner, as he said, and question and
cross-question it, and see, if he could, what it really meant. And he
probably came as near cornering it there in his hut on Walden Pond as
any man ever did anywhere, certainly in a way more pleasing to
contemplate than did the old hermits in the desert, or than did
Diogenes in his tub, though Lowell says the tub of the old Greek had a
sounder bottom.

Lowell seemed to discredit Thoreau by attacking his philosophy and
pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies of a man who
abjures the civilization of which he is the product, overlooking the
fact that man's theories and speculations may be very wide of the
truth as we view it, and yet his life be noble and inspiring. Now
Thoreau did not give us a philosophy, but a life. He gave us fresh a