as an immigrant Frenchman from the island of Jersey, and that his
grandmother was Scotch and Quaker. His father made lead pencils and
ground plumbago in his own house in Concord. The mother was from New
Hampshire. It was a high-minded family. All the four children taught
school and were good talkers. Henry, born in 1817, was duly baptized
by good Dr. Ripley of the Old Manse, studied Greek and Latin, and was
graduated at Harvard in 1837, the year of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa
address. Even in college the young man was a trifle difficult. "Cold and
unimpressible," wrote a classmate. "The touch of his hand was moist and
indifferent. He did not care for people." "An unfavorable opinion has
been entertained of his disposition to exert himself," wrote President
Quincy confidentially to Emerson in 1837, although the kindly President,
a year later, in recommending Thoreau as a school-teacher, certified
that "his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches and his morals
and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary."

Ten years passed. The young man gave up school-keeping, thinking it a
loss of time. He learned pencil-making, surveying, and farm work, and
found that by manual labor for six weeks in the year he could meet all
the expenses of living. He haunted the woods and pastures, explored
rivers and ponds, built the famous hut on Emerson's wood-lot with the
famous axe borrowed from Alcott, was put in jail for refusal to pay
his polltax, and, to sum up much in little, "signed off" from social
obligations. "I, Henry D. Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold
myself responsible to your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil
Government." When his college class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and
each man was asked to send to the secretary a record of achievement,
Thoreau wrote: "My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to
keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may turn
up in heaven or on earth." There is the motto of Transcendentalism,
stamped upon a single coin.

For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier, homelier
version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more easily than
Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the quest. The elder
man had announced the programme, but by 1847 he was himself almost
what Thoreau would call a "committed man," with family and household
responsibilities, with a living to earn, and bound, like every
professional writer