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 XI

HENRY THOREAU

1817-1862

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and lived most of his life in or near his native town. The world, if you were to ask it who Thoreau was, would probably say "a crank," because he did not think and act in quite the same way as other people, and because he practised what he preached. He never went to church or voted at elections, or drank wine or smoked tobacco, and he went to live alone in the woods. He was an author and a naturalist; and, happily for us, he has been able to reveal through his writings what sort of man he was.

But people trouble themselves nowadays very little about the quiet, retiring souls, and so "Walden," the book Thoreau wrote on his Experiment—as he called his period of retirement in the woods, is not so well known as it ought to be; for it seems to stand alone in its beauty and originality; no other book is