her children yet.

Thoreau taxed himself to find words and images strong enough to
express his aversion to the lives of the men who were "engaged" in the
various industrial fields about him. Everywhere in shops and offices
and fields it appeared to him that his neighbors were doing penance in
a thousand remarkable ways:

What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires
and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended,
with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the
heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible
for them to resume their natural position, while from the
twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the
stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a
tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the
breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops
of pillars,--even these forms of conscious penance are
hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which
I daily witness.... I see young men, my townsmen, whose
misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns,
cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily
acquired than got rid of.

Surely this disciple of the Gospel of the Wild must have disappointed
his friends. It was this audacious gift which Thoreau had for making
worldly possessions seem ignoble, that gives the tang to many pages of
his writings.

Thoreau became a great traveler--in Concord, as he says--and made
Walden Pond famous in our literature by spending two or more years in
the woods upon its shore, and writing an account of his sojourn there
which has become a nature classic. He was a poet-naturalist, as his
friend Channing aptly called him, of untiring industry, and the
country in a radius of seven or eight miles about Concord was threaded
by him in all seasons as probably no other section of New England was
ever threaded and scrutinized by any one man. Walking in the fields
and woods, and recording what he saw and heard and thought in his
Journal, became the business of his life. He went over the same ground
endlessly, but always brought back new facts, or new impressions,
because he was so sensitive to all the changing features of the day
and the season in the landscape about him.

Once he extended his walking as far as Quebec, Canada, and once he
took in the whole of Cape Cod; three or four times he made excursions