I am something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not much to any other that he has made.” Let utterances of this kind be remembered in his favor when he seems, as he sometimes does, to be exalting himself above his weaker brethren,—who must live near a doctor, poor things, and can hardly venture to go a-huckleberrying without taking a medicine-chest along; who are still a little afraid of the dark, although Christianity and candles have been introduced.

It is to be remembered always that “Walden” is a young man’s book. A philosopher of thirty may be pardoned for holding the truth somewhat stiffly; finding the ideal truer than the actual, and his own faith a surer guide than other people’s experience. At that age the earnest soul still believes it possible to live according to one’s inner light. With added years, of course, there come added wisdom and a tempering of desire. We no longer expect the moon for a plaything. The thought of personal perfection mostly ceases to haunt us. Our mood has grown humbler, and we wear an easier yoke. We have learned to take things as they are, to feel less confidence in our own intuitions and more respect for traditional and collective opinion. Both outward and inward things are seen in a different light from what formerly shone on them. If we read the same Bible, we give it another interpretation. We have a more practical scale of values. We no longer cultivate poverty as a garden herb; on the whole, as we now think, a good house and money in the bank are more desirable. Nothing is quite so good or quite so bad as we used to imagine. With years we have learned toleration, especially of things evil.

Whether Thoreau would ever have arrived at this pitch of catholicity is more than any one can say; he died before the age of ripeness; but perhaps he was likelier to settle more and more firmly upon his first conviction. As he said of the yew-tree, “flexibility is not known for one of his qualities.” When he went to Walden, at all events, he was still in the enthusiasm of youth and the pride of idealism. It was not the good that he wanted, but the best. He would sell his clothes and keep his thoughts. Nothing that men called prosperity could allure him; nothing that they called adversity could daunt him. He believed in the certainties. No guesswork for him. “There is solid bottom everywhere;” and he meant to find it and build on it. “Better than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” he could say; and again he said, “Say what you have to say, not what you ought.” He would not be strangled by consistency, nor enslaved to the past. “You must make tracks into the Unknown,” he avers. “That is what you have your board and clothes for.” Nothing in his life as a hermit became him better than the manner of his leaving it when the time came. How serenely and bravely he sums up its results:—

“I learned this, at least; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Listen also to the following confession of faith written, in a letter to Mr. Blake, six months after the close of his sojourn at the pond:—

“My actual life is a fact in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect.