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No man was ever born free, and none are equal, and would not remain so an hour, even if Jove, through caprice, should make them so. The Thoreau race is dead. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord there is a monument marking a row of mounds where a half-dozen Thoreaus rest. The inscriptions are all of one size, but the name of one alone lives, and he lives because he had thoughts and expressed them.
The Thoreaus used to sell their pencils down at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, and Harvard professors, for the most part, used the Concord article in jotting down their sublime thoughts. At ten years of age, Thoreau had a furtive eye on Harvard, directed thither, they say, by his mother. All the best people in Concord, who had sons, sent them to Harvard why shouldn't the Thoreaus?
Here and there at the sides, stray tiny little waterfalls, very Thoreaus of streamlets, content to wander off by themselves, away from the noisy rush of the others, making little silvery rills of beauty in unobtrusive ways. Over this gorge was a fallen log. Russell determined to enact the part of Eliza in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," fleeing over the ice.
He was born in an old house on the Virginia Road, Concord, about a mile and a half from the village. This house was the home of Mrs. Thoreau's mother, but the Thoreaus had taken refuge there, temporarily, to escape a financial blizzard which seems to have hit no one else but themselves. John Thoreau was assisted in the pencil-making by the whole family.
The shutter bars the outer world from the school-house. Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled together in a cup, which is the town nearest the school-house. Until twenty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing the rafters overhead, had a hand-loom, and hundreds of weavers lived and died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it.
The shutter bars the outer world from the schoolhouse. Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled together in a cup, which is the town nearest the schoolhouse. Until twenty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing the rafters overhead, had a handloom, and hundreds of weavers lived and died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it.
When his individualism becomes aggressive egotism, as often happens, it is irritating; but when it gives only that pungent and personal flavor which pervades much of "Walden," it is very welcome. Thoreau's critics justly aver that he severely arraigns his countrymen because they are not all Thoreaus that they do not desert their farms and desks and shops and take to the woods.
Kant could have picked up pure reason among the crowds of simply reasoning creatures who have possessed the scene since long before the brain of man was created. Covies of immemorial Thoreaus bivouac under those hazy woods, and pre-glacial Emersons are circling overhead. The problem of successfully living they have all solved. What more have any of us done?
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