INTRODUCTORY NOTE
When some twenty years ago there were sent to me from the portfolios of Emerson papers by different friends of ours, I found among them an essay of twenty-two full manuscript pages, in the familiar script of Thoreau, tied together with knots of faded pink ribbon, like his College Commencement "part," but with no numbering of the pages. If made up, as it probably was (according to Thoreau's constant custom), from his Journals, the fact cannot be well ascertained, so many of the entries before 1841 having been destroyed or lost. More than any of his published writings, it displays that taste for paradox which often is found in authors of a singular originality, and of such a profound imagination as Thoreau had. Its form was perhaps suggested by the discourses on Peace and Non-resistance which in 1840 were so numerous in New England; while the native pugnacity of Thoreau provoked him to take up the cause of war and persist in the apostolic symbolism of the soldier of the Lord, and the Middle-
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