Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/136

114 I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there,—will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?" About the same time are vague references to this plan of his in letters from Channing and Margaret Fuller.

This desire to sequester oneself from conflicting and exacting duties, and to develop the mental and religious life, was no uncommon incident of that age; indeed, it is the aspiration of many individuals in every age. All sections of America can point to some "hermitage" where a recluse has buried himself for purposes of study or religion, sometimes because of blighted affection, and thus has become an object of curiosity to the community. This idea of isolation by individuals and communities, this return to simple agrarian life, was pervasive through the atmosphere half a century ago. Among the college friends of Thoreau, already noted, was Charles Stearns Wheeler, whose tragic death in Germany in 1843, was a great grief to Emerson and Thoreau. His home was in Lincoln, four miles from Concord, and in 1841-2, that he might find time for study and save money for foreign travel, he built a shanty, "a woodland study," near Flint's Pond, midway between