in "Walden";—"I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary." Wealth and poverty are entirely relative concepts. The omission of the artificial seemed to him merely a reasonable and advantageous reform which brought contentment, not resignation. A critic has well said,—"Thoreau represents himself as an epicure rather than an ascetic." He weighed the wealth-acquiring habit against the commensurate deprivations of freedom and leisure, time to enjoy nature and books, and to him the student, supplying physical wants and cultivating mind and soul, seemed the true man of wealth. He was to be envied,—perhaps he is,—by his brother plodding among the flesh-pots of Egypt. His text was akin to the couplet of Young;
"Who lives to nature rarely can be poor;
Who lives to fancy never can be rich."
Emerson said of Thoreau,—"He knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance." Thoreau would, indeed, combat that term, "poor"; his philosophy had taught him that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."
If simplicity, sincerity, leisure, industry, content-
