his culture.”—­That he cannot give up labor without suffering some loss of power.  “How can the man who has learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly?  Shall we say all we think?—­Perhaps with his own hands.—­Let us learn the meaning of economy.—­Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is frugality for gods and heroes.”

This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841.  This “house with one apartment” was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845.  In April of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on intimate terms with him previously to that time.  Whether it was from him that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or whether this idea was working in Thoreau’s mind and was suggested to Emerson by him, is of no great consequence.  Emerson, to whom he owed so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice.  He was at the philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common sense for a moment.  It would never have occurred to him to leave all the conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends “Teague and his jade,” as he called the man and brother and sister, more commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.

“The Americans have many virtues,” he says in this Address, “but they have not Faith and Hope.”  Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the burden of this Address.  But he would regulate these qualities by “a great prospective prudence,” which shall mediate between the spiritual and the actual world.

In the “Lecture on the Times” he shows very clearly the effect which a nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves Reformers had upon him.

“The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea.  They are quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they reprobated.  They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth.  Those who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do.  They bite us, and we run mad also.  I think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have seen it near!—­I do not