HENRY DAVID THOREAU, one of the most extraordinary men of the nineteenth century, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12th, 1817. His father was a manufacturer of lead pencils and in his later years Thoreau himself occasionally followed the same trade. He studied books with success at Harvard University, but the education which made him remarkable was obtained in the woods and fields. He sympathized strongly with the German Transcendentalists, who were inspired by Goethe, and in translating that cult into the terms of his own thought and the modes of his own disposition, he became an extreme Individualist, in the narrower sense in which that word is sometimes used. He was disposed to deny the necessity and effectiveness of co-operation through government for any purpose, and when he retired to Walden Pond, it was to experiment in living an absolutely independent life. Of course this was not possible, and Thoreau, in attempting to live without help from any one, ended by becoming more helpful to every one than an ordinary education could have made him. In Walden woods, and in the woods generally, he gained a familiarity with all animated nature so exquisite that birds and other wild creatures of the woods lost their fear of him and he recovered what some have supposed to be the original human condition of inoffensiveness. This deep and subtle knowledge of nature is what gives his works their value, for his habits of thought are not uniform, nor is his philosophy coherent. Indeed, he ought not to be considered as a logician at all, but rather as a poet with intuitions which are often above the best results of the best logic. He died May 6th, 1862, and is buried near his friends Emerson and Hawthorne in the cemetery of Sleepy Hollow. In addition to a considerable number of poems, often admirable in idea, but defective in metre, he wrote “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” 1849; “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” 1854; “Excursions in Field and Forest,” 1863; “The Maine Woods,” 1864; “Cape Cod,” 1865; “Letters to Various Persons,” 1865; and “A Yankee in Canada,” 1866. All these except the first two have appeared since his death. Extracts from his diaries have also been published.