Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/42

24 towns and villages. It may not be superfluous to recall a few of his suggestions in the third chapter of "Walden";—"It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are indeed so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? If we live in the nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century offers? Why should our lives be in any respect provincial? Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us and we will see if they know anything. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all." Perchance it is not strange that some of Thoreau's contemporaries, failing to recognize in this aspiration an outgrowth of pride and love for Concord and America, which she symbolized to him, resented such bald accusations of provincialism. Such words, however, were needed to incite the educational and literary nascence in America during the last half-century.