I have reserved for the last the greatest and most English artist, from whom we may learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest. All styles appear dull, and all souls sluggish by the side of Byron's. No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination. They are his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which, hardly transformed and modified, he introduces into his verses. He never could make a poem save of his own heart. If Goethe was the poet of the universe, Byron was the poet of the individual; and if the German genius found its interpretation in the one, the English genius found its interpretation in the other. HENRY DAVID THOREAU "Walden" Henry David Thoreau, America's poet-naturalist, as he might be called, was born at Concord, Mass., on July 12, 1817. His great-grandparents were natives of the Channel Islands, whence his grandfather emigrated. Thoreau was educated at Hartford, and began work as a teacher, but under the influence of Emerson, in whose house he lived at intervals, made writing his hobby and a study of the outdoor world his occupation. In 1845, as related in "Walden," he built himself a shanty near Walden Pond, on land belonging to Emerson. There he busied himself with writing his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and in recording his observations in the woods. After the Walden experiment he mingled the pursuit of literature and the doing of odd jobs for a living. His books, "The Maine Woods," "A Yankee in Canada," "Excursions in Field and Wood," were mostly published after his death. He died on May 6, 1862, from consumption. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott were his warm friends in life, and helped the world to appreciate his genius. A poet in heart, Thoreau was only successful in giving his poetry a prose setting, but that setting is harmonised with the utmost delicacy. No one has produced more beautiful effects in English prose with simpler words. _The Simple Life_ When I wrote the following pages, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbour, in a house I had built for myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labour of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. Men labour under a mistake. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it if not before. But it is never too late to give up our prejudices. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. I have lived some thirty years and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors.