by the amount of attention it got from fashionable people. This may have been because it avoided eccentricities and had very few rules—no sect could have had less—and indeed they were particularly keen on not interfering with a person's liberty or private life. Idealism and Economy were the two principal articles of their faith. They were kind, simple, hopeful people, and were known as the Transcendentalists.
Thoreau lived with them for three years. The digging and outdoor work were easy congenial tasks to him, but Emerson, on the contrary, found that digging interfered with his writing, and after he left the sect he never again attempted to combine the two.
Thoreau was twenty-eight when he decided to go away and live by himself. It was not a sudden wish, for he had been thinking of it for some years. It was not because he was a hater of men that he wanted to get away, but he wished to find the answer to certain questions which had been bothering him. He was anxious to find out what real life could teach him, stripped of all its stupid complications and conventions. He wished also to study and to satisfy himself that he could be an author, and he went, too, because he hoped to draw strength and purpose from his experiment.
At this period he possessed only twenty-five dollars of his own, and one day in March he borrowed an axe and went into the woods which lay all around his village, and there, on the side of a thickly wooded
