Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION "Above man's aims his nature rose. The wisdom of a just content Made one small spot a continent. And tuned to poetry life's prose." Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and died there, May 6, 1862. With the exception of brief periods of absence during childhood and youth, a few excursions in adult years to the Maine Woods, the White Mountains, Cape Cod, Quebec, and other easily reached localities, and one longer trip to Minnesota in 1861 in the effort to recover his health, his whole life was spent within the limits of his native town. This was a distinction in which he rejoiced. "I cannot but regard it," he says, "as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering?" And yet there are intimations here and there in his journal that he would have delighted in extensive travel abroad. Few men have ever lived who_possessed DEGREESso keen an appreciation of the attractiveness of the out ward world, and few have been so thoroi the advantages of wnrlfT-widft trnyjj But this experience was denied him, and all he could say was, "I have travelled a great deal -- in Concord." And Thoreau's travels were to some purpose. They did not terminate with his own enjoyment. For the greater part of his life he kept a careful and extended record of his daily excursions and observations, accompanied with a multitude of first-hand -- often elaborate -- moral and philosophical meditations and generalizations, all written in a chaste and...
