Thoreau was a radical Abolitionist and for six years refused to pay his poll-tax, on the ground that the tax went indirectly to the support of slavery. For this delinquency he was once lodged in the town-jail over night. In 1857 he made the acquaintance of ‘one John Brown’ as a Southern-born president of a Northern college naïvely describes that terrible old man. When two years later news came of the desperate attempt at Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau gave in a church vestry at Concord his impassioned ‘Plea for Captain John Brown,’ which one of his admirers regards as the most significant of his utterances. Of the twelve volumes forming his collected writings two only were seen by Thoreau in book form. The remaining ten have been made up of reprinted magazine articles or selections from journals and letters. The list is as follows: _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, 1849; _Walden; or, Life in the Woods_, 1854; _Excursions_ (edited by R. W. Emerson and Sophia Thoreau), 1863; _The Maine Woods_, 1864; _Cape Cod_, 1865; _Letters to Various Persons_ [with Poems], 1865; _A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers_, 1866; _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, 1881; _Summer_, 1884; _Winter_, 1888; _Autumn_, 1892; _Miscellanies_, 1894; _Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau_, 1894. Thoreau ‘travelled widely’ in Concord and made a few trips elsewhere. Aside from his excursions to the Maine woods, the White Mountains, Cape Cod, and Staten Island, he took no long journey until 1861, when he went as far west as Minnesota. He was in ill health then, and a violent cold terminating in pulmonary consumption brought about his death (May 6, 1862). It has been often mentioned as a strange fact that this man who almost symbolized the out-of-door existence, who chanted its praises, and who was unhappy unless he had at least ‘four hours a day in the woods and fields,’ should have died, at the age of forty-five, of exposure to the elements which (according to his whimsical philosophy) were more friendly than man. II THOREAU’S CHARACTER Without posing, Thoreau contrived somehow to gain the reputation of a poseur. Because his nose was more Emersonian than Emerson’s, because he lived for a time at Emerson’s house (where he was beloved by every member of the family), and because he affected the Orphic and seer-like mode of expression, he was called an imitator. Because he was a recluse and a stoic, and because his letters were edited in a way to emphasize his stoicism, he has been thought to lack the human and friendly qualities. The charge of imitation has been refuted by those who knew him best. ‘Doubtless his growth was stimulated by kindred ideas. This is all that can be granted. Utter independence, strong individuality distinguished him. His one foible was, not subserviency, but combativeness, mainly from mere love of fence when he found a worthy adversary, as his best friends knew almost too well.’[43]