als, but was
only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold
benefit?" It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would
feel that they lost by his counsels.

"The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance,
Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and
generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for
themselves as an end."--"I say to you plainly there is no end to
which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if
pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence
to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with
objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible
to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached,--never
touched; always giving health."

Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson's calling to supply impulses
and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many
organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their
views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their
special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in
the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called "Man the
Reformer," and another called "Lecture on the Times." In the first he
preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that "a man should have
a farm, or a mechanical craft for 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 worki