two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and
he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book,
_Walden_, published in 1854. His _Week on the Concord and Merrimac
Rivers_ appeared in 1849. From time to time he went farther afield,
and his journeys were reported in _Cape Cod_, the _Maine Woods_,
_Excursions_, and _A Yankee in Canada_, all of which, as well as a
volume of _Letters_ and _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, have been
given to the public since his death, which happened in 1862. No one
has lived so close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as
Thoreau. His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's
text, "Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce existence to the
simplest terms--to

"live all alone
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweet
Constantly eat."

He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo-Saxon reversion
to the type of the Red Indian. The most distinctive note in Thoreau is
his inhumanity. Emerson spoke of him as a "perfect piece of stoicism."
"Man," said Thoreau, "is only the point on which I stand." He strove
to realize the objective life of nature--nature in its aloofness from
man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mountain. He
listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth.
"What are the trees saying?" he exclaimed. Following upon the trail of
the lumberman, he asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and

"saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight linnaea hang its twin-born heads."