During his lifetime Thoreau published but two books,--_Walden_, and the _Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_,--and these had but limited sale while the author was living. Over seven hundred copies of the _Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ were returned, to Thoreau by his publisher. Thoreau must have had a helpful sense of humor, for after lugging the burden upstairs he complacently remarks,--"I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." In recent times a costly edition of all Thoreau's writings has been published. He is one of the rare spirits whose fame increases with the years. But of all his voluminous writings _Walden_, so it seems to me, is the most readable, the freshest, the most stimulating. Higginson says that it is, perhaps, the only book yet written in America that can bear an annual reading. _Walden_ is a record of Thoreau's sojourn for about two years in the woods by Walden Pond. He went about two miles from his mother's door, built a little house or hut, and there lived, reading his favorite books, philosophizing, studying nature, and to a great extent avoiding society. Some people have condemned him as selfish, others have defended him. His best defense is his work. If anything so fresh and readable as _Walden_ be the result, we might be willing to deny ourselves the society of some of our urban friends, without charging them with selfishness. Thoreau is sometimes called a "wild man"; in a sense, he is untamed. He himself confessed,--"There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness." Yet he was a true lover of men. He hated slavery and went to jail rather than pay his taxes, because he disbelieved in supporting a government that upheld slavery. When his friend, the philosophic Emerson, peered into the prison cell and said,--"Henry, why are you here?" the quick retort was,--"Why are you not here?" It must be remembered that Thoreau lived in a time of social experiment. Hawthorne had thrown in his lot for a brief time with the Brook Farm idealists. Why should not Thoreau make an experiment of his own? Why not live the simple life before Wagner wrote about it? He was tired of the conventionalities of society, of the incessant interruptions to steady thought. Society is naught but a conspiracy to compel imitation. "The head monkey of Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same." So Thoreau moves out into the woods by the side of Walden Pond. Before he can live there he must build his house: