Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/14

Rh of a social and philosophic movement which attracted many earnest thinkers; and among these "apostles of the newness," who preached an ideal simplicity both in life and art, there was none more single-hearted and resolute than Henry Thoreau.

The remainder of his life was spent in his native village or its neighborhood, varied by occasional brief visits to Boston or New York, and more lengthy excursions to Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire, the forests of Maine, and the sandy peninsula of Cape Cod. His thrifty, self-contented nature did not need the stimulus of travel, in the ordinary sense; it was at once his pleasure and his profit to find in Concord all the material of his thought. After a brief experience of school-keeping, he supported himself by pencil-making, land-surveying, and various odd pieces of handicraft, his singular aptness and dexterity enabling him to satisfy the few wants of his existence (for he deliberately minimised his wants in order to secure greater leisure and personal liberty) by a very small outlay of remunerative labour, and so to devote himself more freely to what he considered the real business of his life, the study of wild nature, which earned him the appropriate title of the "poet-naturalist." He died at Concord, in 1862, of pulmonary consumption, the result of a cold caught while botanizing in severe winter weather.

Thoreau's singular personality has thus been described by Emerson. "Henry was homely in appearance, a rugged stone hewn from the cliff. I believe it is accorded to all men to be moderately homely. But he surpassed sex. He had a beautiful smile, and an earnest look. His character reminds me of Massillon. One