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292 the sanative reaction from excess of business and society. She could restore health and contentment because of her strength and steadfastness. His contemporaries regarded such sentiments as eccentric and the visions of a poet. To-day, his doctrines of nature, and her part in retaining the mental and physical poise of a well-rounded life, are the accepted tenets of tired, distraught men and women. They form the basis of purpose, not alone in the plans of recreation and recuperation for wearied adults, but also in the great movement towards nature study which has become a potent factor in the modern school-curriculum.

Thoreau's persistent seclusion often prevented him from understanding the educative influences which combine with the deteriorating tendencies in modern luxurious life. Like the prophets of old, he saw only danger and uttered warnings against the social and commercial allurements which would, in time, fatten the senses, but warp the mind and shrivel the soul. The burden of his plea as naturalist and poet was the renunciation of the superfluous and time-stealing luxuries of a "hothouse existence," the substitution, for these baneful temptations, of a devotion to nature which, in brief time would satisfy all the faculties, would bring comradeship, would ensure health and peace. Finally,