He could
make a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar,
a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage
a boat. The smallest occasion served to display his physical
accomplishment; and a manufacturer, from merely observing his dexterity
with the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the
spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability to
do some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses,
so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be
changed in his case, for he could do most things with unusual
perfection. And perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when he
wrote: "Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the
universe are not indifferent, _but are for ever on the side of the most
sensitive_." II

Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life
of self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures,
but pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one,
he turned all his strength in that direction. He was met upon the
threshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many
agreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery
to live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation
without what are quaintly but happily denominated private means; these
absent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the
public such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to
put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourer
necessity than it is to most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of
the wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence against the
yoke of custom; and he was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy
in his own society, that he could consent with difficulty even to the
interruptions of friendship. "_Such are my engagements to myself_ that I
dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and the
italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and
between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is
so busy improving himself that he must think twice about a morning call. And now imagine him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial
and unmeaning business! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical
in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly
progressive. Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he had
gained the best certificate, and his friends began to congratulate him
on his establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make
another. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not do again what I have done
once." For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it
is of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and
when it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently to
this mechanical art--a step more than worthy of himself. The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experiment in the service
of Admetus; but others followed. "I have thoroughly tried
school-keeping," he writes, "and found that my expenses were in
proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged
to dress and train, not to say, think and believe, accordingly, and I
lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the benefit of my
fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have
tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way
in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil." Nothing, indeed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon
that subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole enterprise of
this nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is not
warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a man should lay
down his life, nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants did
not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of
this world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a
hundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest
fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the
figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a
brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire. Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one after
another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He saw
his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and
Admetus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It
was his ambition to be an Oriental philosopher; but he was always a very
Yankee sort of Oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood
to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he
displayed a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted
poverty like a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or two
ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are
only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentially
youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at current
opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind
of speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure
there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his
system of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that
the accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect
where there are no catch-words ready made for the defender; after you
have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is
an assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt. "The cost of a thing," says he, "is _the amount of what I will call
life_ which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
long run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more
clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty. Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not
fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in
Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it
the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death. There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,
and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a
two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you
afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least
degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no
authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible.