nary, which fully possessed him,—an ambition to obey his purest instincts, to follow implicitly the finest intimations of his genius, to secure thus the fullest and freest life of which he was capable. He chose to lay emphasis on his relations to nature and the universe rather than on those he bore to the ant-hill of society, not to be merely another wheel in the social machine. He felt that the present is only one among the possible forms of civilization, and so preferred not to commit himself to it. Herein lies the secret of that love of the wild which was so prominent a trait in his character.
It is evident that the main object of society now is to provide for our material wants, and still more and more luxuriously for them, while the higher wants of our nature are made secondary, put off for some Sunday service and future leisure. A great lesson of Thoreau's life is that all this must be reversed, that whatever relates to the supply of inferior wants must be simplified, in order that the higher life may be enriched, though he desired no servile imitation of his own methods, for perhaps the highest lesson of all to be learnt from him is that the only way of salvation lies in the strictest fidelity to one's own genius.
A late English reviewer, who shows in many respects a very just appreciation of Thoreau,
