... 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."
The reason why he left Walden shows one of his pronounced transcendental
characteristics, a dread of repetition. He gives an account of only his
first year of life there, and adds, "the second year was similar to it." He
says:--
"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed
to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more
time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall
into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not
lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond
side."
He does not demand that other human beings shall imitate him in devoting
their lives to a study of nature. He says, "Follow your genius closely
enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour." He
thus expresses his conception of the fundamental basis of happiness in any
of the chosen avenues of life:--
"Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce
between virtue and vice.
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