desired in point of wording and of verse. His _Hymn Sung at the
Completion of the Concord Monument_, in 1836, is the perfect model of
an occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the time of
the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot heard round the
world" has hardly echoed farther than the song which chronicled it.
Equally current is the stanza from _Voluntaries_:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
The youth replies, 'I can.'"

So, too, the famous lines from the _Problem_:

"The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity.
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew;
The conscious stone to beauty grew."

The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry David Thoreau, "the
poet-naturalist." After his graduation from Harvard College, in 1837,
Thoreau engaged in school-teaching and in the manufacture of
lead-pencils, but soon gave up all regular business and devoted himself
to walking, reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time
private tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he supported himself
for a season by doing odd jobs in land-surveying for the farmers about
Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the
banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for