Page:Some unpublished letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau; a chapter in the history of a still-born book.djvu/35

 upon civilization. 'His shanty life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. The tub of Diogenes has a sounder bottom. Thoreau's experiment actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted upon another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all.' I question whether in all the history of criticism a blinder misconception can be found."

[Just here the ex-professor was