Thoreau found that he could earn enough in six weeks to support
himself in this simple way for the rest of the year. He thus acquired the
leisure to write books that are each year read with increasing interest.
The record of his life at Walden forms the basis for his best known work. A
few people practice the return to nature for a short time, but Thoreau
spent his available life with nature.
He was a pronounced individualist, carrying out Emerson's doctrine by
becoming independent of others' opinions. What he thought right, he said or
did. He disapproved, for example, of slavery, and consequently refused to
pay his poll tax to a government that upheld slavery. When he was
imprisoned because of non-payment, Emerson visited him and asked, "Why are
you here, Henry?" Thoreau merely replied, "Why are you _not_ here?"
His intense individualism made him angular, and his transcendental love of
isolation caused him to declare that he had never found "the companion that
was so companionable as solitude"; but he was, nevertheless, spicy,
original, loyal to friends, a man of deep family affection, stoical in his
ability to stand privations, and Puritanic in his conviction about the
moral aim of life.
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