interests; it gives him the profit of industry with the
pleasures of a pastime. This is what his art should be to
the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and
less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand apart
from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at
the centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals
directly with his experiences, teaches him the lessons of his
own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his
biography. So says Goethe:


"Spat erklingt was fruh erklang;
Gluck und Ungluck wird Gesang."


Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he
had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in
good books. He said well, "Life is not habitually seen from
any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the
light of literature." But the literature he loved was of the
heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring;
such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be
entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing
institutions - such I call good books." He did not think
them easy to be read. "The heroic books," he says, "even if
printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will always be
in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,
conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of