Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/17

6 shown in the essay contributed to the Democratic Review in 1843, under the title of "Paradise (to be) Regained," a notice, ironical in tone, yet kindly withal, of a Fourierite volume which advocated a method of speedily realizing the millennium by means of co-operation and machinery. For the same reason, when a section of the transcendentalist party was occupied in organizing communities at Brook Farm and elsewhere, Thoreau stood resolutely aloof, preferring to achieve his independence by what was to him the surer and more congenial method of simplifying his own life. "As for these communities," he wrote in 1841, "I would rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven. The boarder has no home. In heaven I hope to bake my own bread and clean my own linen."

It was this same individualistic tendency that led him to make his now famous retirement to the shore of Walden Pond, where, in 1845, he built himself a shanty, in which he lived for over two years, as has been inimitably related by him in the most characteristic and widely appreciated of his writings. It should be noted, however, that this sojourn in the woods, though perhaps the most striking episode of his career, was an episode only, and occupied but a tenth part of his mature life; it was simply a period of self-trial and communion with nature, in which he tested the soundness and efficacy of those intellectual weapons of which, as we shall see, he afterwards made brilliant use. It is therefore a misunderstanding, none the less complete because it is so common, to regard Thoreau as a cynical recluse, coldly indifferent to the interests and welfare of his fellow-men. He went to Walden, as he himself recorded, for a definite purpose,