Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/92

72 secluded experience when he says: "The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as the dervish in the desert." To live economically and yet live, not play life, seems to him the desideratum for the college student. He would have economy applied to practical life;—"Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably." Thoreau's own expenses, about one hundred and eighty-five dollars according to the catalogue of the time, involved careful retrenchments both from his aunts and his own family circle. He must have been precluded thus from certain social privileges even had his nature allured him thither. He also received a small scholarship.

During the winter months of 1835–6, he taught school at Canton, Massachusetts, and here studied German and imbibed Transcendentalism at the home of Rev. Orestes Brownson of Brook Farm fame. In his interesting study of this community, Mr. Lindsay Swift has emphasized many traits of Brownson. He was a zealous social reformer, radical in all ideas of government, labor and religion;