PREFACE
teaching during the last thirty years recall those of the brothers; and where is corporal punishment?
As to the pencil business. I wish to show his dutiful and respectful attitude toward his family, and the important part he bore in improving their lead-pencil business and putting it for the time beyond competition in this country, giving them a good maintenance; although "his life was too valuable to him to put into lead-pencils." Suppose he had done so?
I wish to show that Thoreau, though brusque on occasions, was refined, courteous, kind and humane; that he had a religion and lived up to it.
"If you build castles in the air," he said, "that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
Edward Waldo Emerson
Concord May 1917
