genuine a
brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire.

Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one after
another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He saw
his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and
Admetus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It
was his ambition to be an Oriental philosopher; but he was always a very
Yankee sort of Oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood
to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he
displayed a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted
poverty like a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or two
ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are
only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentially
youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at current
opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind
of speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure
there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his
system of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that
the accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect
where there are no catch-words ready made for the defender; after you
have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is
an assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt.

"The cost of a thing," says he, "is _the amount of what I will call
life_ which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
long run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more
clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.
Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not
fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in
Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it
the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.
There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,
and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a
two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you
afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least
degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no
authority for tha