He had as many trades as fingers, he said. If a few dollars were required, he took a job at surveying, or made lead pencils, or built a fence or a boat, or grafted a neighbor’s fruit trees, or planted a garden. Whatever else he was, he was a born mechanic, “very competent,” as Emerson says of him, “to live in any part of the world.” In a railway car he displayed such address in dealing with an obstinate window that a fellow passenger offered to hire him on the spot; an anecdote which goes with sundry others to show that Thoreau habitually dressed and looked more like a “laboring man” than a scholar.

If he was “competent to live in any part of the world,” he was peculiarly fitted to live in Concord. The fates had been kind to him. The lines had fallen to him in pleasant places; he wished no goodlier heritage. He left Concord only for brief seasons, and always returned to it gladly. Here he soon began in earnest to do his own work: thinking, reading, walking, and keeping a journal,—a journal out of which his books were to be made.

For the furtherance of this work, a temporary withdrawal to the woods had been under contemplation by Thoreau for several years. Nothing could have been more natural and less surprising for a young man of his tastes and purposes. The dream, at least, was inevitable. It was not his alone. His friends and associates, the band of earnest transcendentalists whose headquarters, so to speak, were in Concord, were also planning a separation from the world. They thought, however, of a life in common, and made their experiments accordingly,—at Brook Farm and Fruitlands,—with what success or want of success need not here be estimated. Thoreau wished no share in these Utopian partnerships. His dream was of individual independence. “As for their communities,” he says, with characteristic freedom of speech, “I think I had rather keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.” His heart was set upon a hermitage. He “suspected any enterprise in which two were engaged together.” “When the sticks prop one another, none, or only one, stands erect.” And in another place he jots down the same thought thus: “No fruit will ripen on the common.”

As early as October, 1841, Margaret Fuller writes to him, as of something already talked about: “Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut;” and two months later Thoreau wrote in his diary: “I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds.” His friends, he added, were curious to know what he would do when he got there; but he thought it would be “employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons.” For a time he coveted the Hollowell farm, a retired spot near the river, some two miles from the village; and according to his own whimsical account of the affair,—which the reader must take more or less seriously, as he can,—he even went so far as to negotiate for its purchase. At the last moment, fortunately, the owner’s wife changed her mind and refused to sign the deed (“every man has such a wife,” is Thoreau’s comment), and the bargain failed. So near did he come to owning a landed estate; but he “never got his fingers burned by actual possession.” Not that he loved the Hollowell farm less; “I retained the landscape,” he says, “and have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow;” but he was saved from becoming a “serf of the soil;” he had the good of the land, and yet his poverty was not damaged.

He lost the Hollowell farm, but he kept his dream, and in March, 1845, he borrowed Alcott’s axe and began cutting down trees on land belonging to Emerson on the shore of Walden Pond. In May the house was “raised,” Alcott, Curtis, and others assisting, and on the 4th of July Thoreau celebrated his independence by moving into it. There he lived for something more than two years. There he edited (put together out of his journals and out of the pages of “The Dial”) his first book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers;” and there he lived (and partly wrote) his second book, “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”

The latter work, the one with which we have here particularly to do, may be called the record of a personal and experimental treatment of the poor scholar’s question, the question which Thoreau himself had been compelled to face on leaving college: How shall I get my living and still have time to live? There is much else in the book, of course,—Thoreau was a journalizer, and a journalizer is ever discursive,—but this is its core, as we may say; this it is that gives it the comparative unity and concreteness which have greatly assisted its popularity. That it is the best known and most widely enjoyed of all Thoreau’s books is not to be doubted. Whether it is intrinsically better than the Week and the volumes of the Journal is a point about which readers may be allowed and expected to differ, not only with one another, but sometimes with themselves.

Like every real book, “Walden” is for its own hours and its own minds; a book for those who love books, for those who love nature, for those who love courageous thinking, courageous acting, and all sturdy, manly virtues; a book to be read through; a book, also, to be read in parts, as one uses a manual of devotion; a tonic book in the truest sense; a book against meanness, conformity, timidity, discouragement, unbelief; a book easily conceived of as marking an era in a reader’s life; a book for the individual soul against the world. Its author believed in “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust;” in an “economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy;” in “the poverty that enjoys true wealth.” His literary creed was stoical, like his personal tastes. Reading, in his view, was, or ought to be, “a noble, intellectual exercise.” He did not wish to be lulled asleep; nor would he suffer his life to be taken by newspapers and novels. Perhaps his taste was narrow. He believed in books that call for alertness, books that a man must “stand on tiptoe to read;” books that deal with high themes simply; books “solidly done,” not “cursed with a style.”

He aimed to make his own work conform to these standards. “Good writing,” he thinks, “will be obedience to conscience,” with no “particle of will or whim;” and it will only be done with pains. “The most transient and passing remark must be reconsidered by the writer, made sure and warranted, as if the earth had rested on its axis to back it.” In his writing, as truly as in his daily living, he practiced economy. He knew the secret of strength, and trimmed his sentences close.