gret, but he became master of circumstances, and he made himself exempt from their control.
As if in answer to the suggested effect of broadening his sympathies, is the significant passage in the journal for November 12, 1853, now included in "Autumn":—"I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have had the steering of me, that by want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this native region so long and so steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature."
By study, assimilation, and actual experiment, Thoreau framed an individual philosophy. This he adopted and exampled in a life, in the main, consistent and happy. For such reasons, he can speak as a seer to these later decades. He foretold the necessarv conditions, the foundation-stones of a moral and uplifting community,—simplicity, integrity, work, and contentment. He prophesied the decadence of fibres of intellect and soul in a civilization which becomes careless of the higher nature, which becomes absorbed in materialism, luxuries, and artificial society. To guard against such temptations for himself and mankind, he found sanative
