ove its source, and man is as good
as is the nature out of which he came, and of which he is a part. Most
of Thoreau's harsh judgments upon his neighbors and countrymen are
only his extreme individualism gone to seed.

An extremist he always was. Extreme views commended themselves to him
because they were extreme. His aim in writing was usually "to make an
extreme statement." He left the middle ground to the school committees
and trustees. He had in him the stuff of which martyrs and heroes are
made. In John Brown he recognized a kindred soul. But his literary
bent led him to take his own revolutionary impulses out in words. The
closest he came to imitation of the hero of Harper's Ferry and to
defying the Government was on one occasion when he refused to pay his
poll-tax and thus got himself locked in jail overnight. It all seems a
petty and ignoble ending of his fierce denunciation of politics and
government, but it no doubt helped to satisfy his imagination, which
so tyrannized over him throughout life. He could endure offenses
against his heart and conscience and reason easier than against his
imagination.

He presents that curious phenomenon of a man who is an extreme product
of culture and civilization, and yet who so hungers and thirsts for
the wild and the primitive that he is unfair to the forces and
conditions out of which he came, and by which he is at all times
nourished and upheld. He made his excursions into the Maine wilderness
and lived in his hut by Walden Pond as a scholar and philosopher, and
not at all in the spirit of the lumbermen and sportsmen whose wildness
he so much admired. It was from his vantage-ground of culture and of
Concord transcendentalism that he appraised all these types. It was
from a community built up and sustained by the common industries and
the love of gain that he decried all these things. It was from a town
and a civilization that owed much to the pine tree that he launched
his diatribe against the lumbermen in the Maine woods: "The pine is no
more lumber than man is; and to be made into boards and houses no more
its true and highest use than the truest use of man is to be cut down
and made into manure." Not a happy comparison, but no matter. If the
pine tree had not been cut down and made into lumber, it is quite
certain that Thoreau would never have got to the Maine woods to utter
this protest, just as it is equally certain that had he not been a
member of a thrifty and in