s of the property in his line
of march. There is a tradition that he and Channing once went through
a house where the front and back door stood open. In his mental
flights and excursions he follows this plan almost entirely; the hard
facts and experiences of life trouble him very little. He can always
ignore them or sail serenely above them.

How is one to reconcile such an expression as this with what his
friends report of his actual life: "My countrymen are to me
foreigners. I have but little more sympathy with them than with the
mobs of India or China"? Or this about his Concord neighbors, as he
looks down upon them from a near-by hill: "On whatever side I look
off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have
lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by
grovelling, coarse, and low-minded men?--no scenery can redeem it.
Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as
men of a similar character." Tried by his ideal standards, his
neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of course, found wanting,
yet he went about among them helpful and sympathetic and enjoyed his
life to the last gasp. These things reveal to us what a gulf there
may be between a man's actual life and the high altitudes in which he
disports himself when he lets go his imagination.

IX

In his paper called "Life without Principle," his radical idealism
comes out: To work for money, or for subsistence alone, is life
without principle. A man must work for the love of the work. Get a man
to work for you who is actuated by love for you or for the work alone.
Find some one to beat your rugs and carpets and clean out your well,
or weed your onion-patch, who is not influenced by any money
consideration. This were ideal, indeed; this suggests paradise.
Thoreau probably loved his lecturing, and his surveying, and his
magazine writing, and the money these avocations brought him did not
seem unworthy, but could the business and industrial world safely
adopt that principle?

So far as I understand him, we all live without principle when we do
anything that goes against the grain, or for money, or for bread
alone. "To have done anything by which you earned money is to have
been truly idle or worse." "If you would get money as a writer or
lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly."
Yet his neighbor Emerson was in much demand as a lecturer, and earned
a good deal of money in tha