Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/161

Rh a granary and tool-house until a few years after Thoreau's death.

There have been some experiments modeled after this Walden life that are unrecorded in accessible form, but the most familiar was the encampment at Walden in 1869–1870 of a young theological student, Edmund Stuart Hotham, of New York. Here, in a rude cabin, he studied theology and is referred to by Channing in "The Wanderer." Among many readers of "Walden" none have gained more recent notice than "A Victim of Thoreau," so humorously sketched by Dr. Charles C. Abbott in his "Recent Rambles." In a woodland stroll he met this "philosophic tramp" who could repeat pages of "Walden" but who had decided, by sad experience, that "Thoreau's philosophy won't work." Conversation disclosed the fact that he had tried the Walden plan with improvements, or rather with omissions, since energy and industry seemed lacking in his plan. His complaint was that he could not "get a living" by passive delight in nature and spasmodic cultivation of a bean-field.

The Walden encampment has too often been exaggerated as well as distorted. In it Thoreau was neither a hermit nor a misanthrope. It formed simply a climax to his years of preparation. Mr.