adlaugh, the free-thought protagonist, who introduced him to the
conductors of various secularist publications. His best known poem is
_The City of Dreadful Night_, deeply pessimistic. Others are _Vane's
Story_ and _Weddah and Omel-Bonain_. His views resulted in depression,
which led to dipsomania, and he _d._ in poverty and misery. His work has
a certain gloomy power which renders it distinctly noteworthy.

THOREAU, HENRY DAVID (1817-1862).--Essayist, poet, and naturalist, was
_b._ at Concord, Massachusetts. His _f._, of French extraction, from
Jersey, was a manufacturer of lead-pencils. He was _ed._ at Harvard,
where he became a good classical scholar. Subsequently he was a competent
Orientalist, and was deeply versed in the history and manners of the Red
Indians. No form of regular remunerative employment commending itself to
him, he spent the 10 years after leaving coll. in the study of books and
nature, for the latter of which he had exceptional qualifications in the
acuteness of his senses and his powers of observation. Though not a
misanthropist, he appears in general to have preferred solitary communion
with nature to human society. "The man I meet," he said, "is seldom so
instructive as the silence which he breaks;" and he described himself as
"a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher." He made such
money as his extremely simple mode of life called for, by building boats
or fences, agricultural or garden work, and surveying, anything almost of
an outdoor character which did not involve lengthened engagement. In 1837
he began his diaries, records of observation with which in ten years he
filled 30 vols. In 1839 he made the excursion the record of which he in
1845 _pub._ as _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_. Two years
later, in 1841, he began a residence in the household of Emerson, which
lasted for two years, when he assisted in conducting the _Dial_, and in
1845, after some teaching in New York, he retired to a hut near the
solitary Walden Pond to write his _Week on the Concord_, etc. Later works
were _Walden_ (1854), and _The Maine Woods_ (1864), and _Cape Cod_
(1865), accounts of excursions and observations, both _pub._ after his
death. T. was an enthusiast in the anti-slavery cause, the triumph of
which, however, he did not live to see, as he _d._ on May 6, 1862, when
the war was still in its earlier stages. The deliberate aim of T. was to
live a life as nearly approaching naturalne