Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/147

Rh editing, surveying, pencil-making, and like pursuits, but he found these occupations so confining, with so little margin for the free, full expression of his higher nature, that he felt shriveled and rebelled against such mechanical thraldom. He believed, and proved by his experiment, that a student who was content to reduce his wants to the lowest ratio, who would combine in moderation manual work and mental improvement, could thus secure the greatest blessings of life. Like our Southern poet, Paul Hamilton Hayne, at Copse Hill, he found in the pine retreat invigoration for body and spirit. Here he would experimentalize with the bugbear, maintenance, regarding the four requisites of life,—shelter, food, fuel, and clothing,—here he would expand and train his mind and soul.

In no way was he anxious to pose as a hermit or even a strict recluse. Nearly every day he walked to the village, as he tells us, to see his family and friends and gather the news. He was within access of any real service which he might render, he was a popular host, and his life there as elsewhere, commingled "the human and the sylvan." Among magazine articles that exerted a modicum of unjust influence during his life was that in Chamber's Journal, November 21, 1857, entitled "An American Diogenes." It abounds in false statements and