Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/135

Rh together; he did, however, advocate cooperation, in the sense of working together. In "Walden" he says,—"To cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together." Deeply influenced by the reform theories of his friends, though averse to their schemes, lacking dependent home-ties, with his independent doctrine of self-expansion firmly planted, Thoreau had long planned to go into semi-retirement for study of nature, reflection and writing. Already he had tested his powers and inclinations and had so far "found himself" that he recognized his special gifts as nature-interpreter and poet. To more fully observe her forms and changes, to have leisure from sordid tasks for calm reflection, he wished to shut himself within some isolated retreat there to educe a philosophy of life. In the Commencement Conference, already mentioned, he had said;—"The order of things should be somewhat reversed; the seventh should be a man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul—in which to range this widespread garden and drink in the soft influence and sublime revelations of nature." Thus early had this nebulous fancy haunted him! In his journal, December 24, 1841, is recorded,—"I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where