“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 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.”