could meet all the expenses of living. He haunted the woods and
pastures, explored rivers and ponds, built the famous hut on
Emerson's wood-lot with the famous axe borrowed from Alcott, was
put in jail for refusal to pay his polltax, and, to sum up much
in little, "signed off" from social obligations. "I, Henry D.
Thoreau, have signed off, and do not hold myself responsible to
your multifarious uncivil chaos named Civil Government." When his
college class held its tenth reunion in 1847, and each man was
asked to send to the secretary a record of achievement, Thoreau
wrote: "My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to
keep myself at the top of my condition and ready for whatever may
turn up in heaven or on earth." There is the motto of
Transcendentalism, stamped upon a single coin.

For "to be ready for whatever may turn up" is Thoreau's racier,
homelier version of Emerson's "endless seeker"; and Thoreau, more
easily than Emerson, could venture to stake everything upon the
quest. The elder man had announced the programme, but by 1847 he
was himself almost what Thoreau would call a "committed man,"
with family and household responsibilities, with a living to
earn, and bound, like every professional writer and speaker, to
have some measure of regard for his public. But Thoreau was ready
to travel lightly and alone. If he should fail in the great
adventure for spiritual perfection, it was his own affair. He had
no intimates, no confidant save the multitudinous pages of his
"Journal," from which--and here again he followed Emerson's
example--his future books were to be compiled. Many of his most
loyal admirers will admit that such a quest is bound, by the very
conditions of the problem, to be futile. Hawthorne allegorized it
in "Ethan Brand," and his quaint illustration of the folly of