Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/162

138 Salt says, with force and succinctness,—"He was a student when he went to Walden; when he returned to Concord, he was a teacher." His residence amid the elemental, uplifting forces of nature had brought him temporal health and happiness and permanent knowledge of nature and life in its simple, fontal issues. In the woods he learned the "essential facts," a lesson to which he was to give expression in future years. No expansion of this thought could equal his own admirable conclusion in "Walden":—"He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Viewed from the focus of to-day, which often yearns for but seldom attains real privacy with nature and simplification of life, this seclusion of Thoreau has a far different aspect from that of its