In short, he repeated, less plainly, what he had said in the beginning of “Walden” itself, that his teaching was only for those who could take it. Others would but stretch the seams of the coat in putting it on.

This much is certain: he wished no imitators. It was no part of his purpose that men in general should live apart in huts. He preached no crusade, or none of that kind. He went to Walden, for a longer or shorter period, as things should turn out, “to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” not to set an example for others to follow. For one thing, he said, by the time they were ready to follow it, he should very likely be doing something else. Besides which, he desired that there should be “as many different people in the world as possible.”

At the same time, he made no concealment of his belief that most of his neighbors, who were “said to live in Concord,” were living foolishly, spending money for that which was not bread, and their labor for that which could never satisfy a man’s craving. He had “traveled a good deal in Concord,” and he knew that men were living in a vain show. How they should free themselves, he would not take upon himself to say; but he would tell his own experience, and crow over it as lustily as any chanticleer. The root of men’s trouble lay in mistaking the nature of good; in preferring the outward; in making life to consist in an abundance of things; in brief, the error sprang from a lack of simplicity and faith. The formula of life had become too complicated. To get a pair of shoe-strings a man speculated in herds of cattle. Each must have as many needless “goods” as his neighbor, and kept himself poor in the struggle to acquire them; “as if a man were to complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown!” From such a slavery, as degrading as it is uncomfortable, let us be delivered at any price. “He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap.”

“I preferred some things to others,” said Thoreau; and those few words, rightly considered, are the sufficient explanation of his peculiar manner of life. If other men liked to be industrious for industry’s sake or to keep themselves out of mischief, if they must have rich carpets and delicate cookery at the expense of personal servitude, he had nothing to say. De gustibus non est disputandum. He had his own life to live and meant to enjoy it rather than its accidents. If this was selfish, he did not mind. His neighbors were all so charitable that he hoped one man might be allowed to go his own way and fulfill his own destiny. By such a course, indeed, he might really be doing his fellows the highest service. A Newfoundland dog will pull a drowning man out of a ditch, but it takes something better than a dog to set an example of real goodness. Philanthropy—of the Newfoundland dog type—is already sufficiently appreciated. Let the world learn to value its spiritual fathers and mothers rather than its dear old uncles and aunts; to welcome instruction in righteousness rather than to be forever asking alms.

Thoreau’s treatment of this question, How to live, and what to live for, makes, as we have said, the core of his book; but some readers, or readers in some moods, may enjoy better still the chapters in which he deals with his own every-day life at Walden. Though he dwelt in the woods, he was but two miles from the village, and had many visitors. “Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season,” he says; and many of them he turned to admirable literary account. The best of them in this respect was not Alcott, nor Channing; nor the town paupers, “good for fencing-stuff;” nor the runaway slave, whom Thoreau “helped to forward toward the north star;” nor the ministers, “who could not bear all kinds of opinions;” nor Mrs. ——, who discovered somehow that the solitary’s sheets were not so clean as they might have been; nor the old hunter with a long tongue, who came once a year to bathe in the pond; nor the Lexington man who arrived, one day, to inquire for a lost hound, but could hardly listen to Thoreau’s answer, he was so eager to ask, “What do you do here?” None of these were so good, when ground into paint, as the Canadian wood-chopper and post-maker. He, if any of Thoreau’s men, is among the immortals.

Better than most of these human visitors, from the point of view of Thoreau’s enjoyment and use of them, at all events, were his “brute neighbors:” the brown thrasher, that encouraged him in his garden, where he was “making the earth say beans instead of grass;” the nighthawks and the hen hawks, which he leaned on his hoe to watch in their soarings; the phœbe that built her nest in his shed, and the grouse that led her brood past his windows; the wild mouse that nibbled cheese from between the hermit’s fingers; the squirrels, “singularly frivolous and whimsical,” that stepped on his shoe, and the chickadees that alighted on the armful of wood he was carrying; the hares that came round the door to pick up the potato parings, and then, when the door was opened, went off “with a squeak and a bounce;” the “silly loon,” with its laugh like a demon’s and its howl like a wolf’s, silly, but too cunning for its pursuer, nevertheless. These and many more he has put into his book, not to forget the ants that waged a battle in his woodpile, a battle which he has narrated with such wonderful particularity and sympathy. “Concord Fight!” he exclaims.