romantic expansion of the self apart from the common interests of
human kind is the picture of a dog chasing its own tail. "It is
time now that I begin to live," notes Thoreau in the "Journal,"
and he continued to say it in a hundred different ways until the
end of all his journalizing, but he never quite captured the
fugitive felicity. The haunting pathos of his own allegory has
moved every reader of "Walden:" "I long ago lost a hound, a bay
horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail." Precisely
what he meant it is now impossible to say, but surely he betrays
a doubt in the ultimate efficacy of his own system of life. He
bends doggedly to the trail, for Henry Thoreau is no quitter, but
the trail leads nowhere, and in the latest volumes of the
"Journals" he seems to realize that he has been pursuing a
phantom. He dived fearlessly and deep into himself, but somehow
he failed to grasp that pearl of great price which all the
transcendental prophets assured him was to be had at the cost of
diving.

This is not to say that this austere and strenuous athlete came
up quite empty-handed. Far from it. The byproducts of his toil
were enough to have enriched many lesser men, and they have given
Thoreau a secure fame. From his boyhood he longed to make himself
a writer, and an admirable writer he became. "For along time," he
says in "Walden," "I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
circulation, whose editor has never seen fit to print the bulk of
my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only
my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their
reward." Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of
intense, long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist
enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled from his note