Back Henry David Thoreau went to making pencils and grinding graphite. By early 1845 he felt more restless than ever, until he decided to take up an idea of a Harvard classmate who had once built a waterside hut in which one could loaf or read. In the spring he picked a spot by Walden Pond, a small glacial lake located 2 miles (3 km) south of Concord on land Emerson owned.
Early in the spring of 1845, Thoreau, then 27 years old, began to chop down tall pines with which to build the foundations of his home on the shores of Walden Pond. From the outset the move gave him profound satisfaction. Once settled, Thoreau restricted his diet for the most part to what fruit and vegetables he found growing wild and the beans he planted and hoed. When not busy weeding his bean rows and trying to protect them from hungry woodchucks, or occupied with fishing, swimming, or rowing, he spent long hours observing and recording the local flora and fauna, reading, and writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and making entries in his journals, which later he would polish and include in Walden. Much time, too, was spent in meditation.
Out of such activity and thought came Walden, a series of 18 essays describing his experiment in basic living and his effort to set his time free for leisure. Several of the essays provide Thoreau's original perspective on the meaning of work and leisure and describe his experiment in living as simply and self-sufficiently as possible, while in others Henry David Thoreau describes the various realities of life at Walden Pond: his intimacy with the small animals he came in contact with; the sounds, smells, and look of woods and water at various seasons; the music of wind in telegraph wires—in short, the felicities of learning how to fulfill his desire to live as simply and self-sufficiently as possible. The physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond is what gives the book authority, while Thoreau's command of a clear, straightforward, but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic.
Thoreau stayed for two years at Walden Pond (1845–47). In the summer of 1847 Ralph Waldo Emerson invited him to stay with his wife and children again, while Emerson himself went to Europe. Thoreau accepted. In September 1847 he left his cabin forever.
Midway in his Walden sojourn Thoreau had spent a night in jail. On an evening in July 1846 he was accosted by Sam Staples, the constable and tax gatherer. Sam asked him amiably to pay his poll tax, which he had omitted paying for several years. He declined and Sam locked him up. The next morning a still-unidentified lady, perhaps his aunt, Maria, paid the tax. Thoreau reluctantly emerged, did an errand, and then went huckleberrying. A single night, he decided, was enough to make his point. His point was that he could not support a government that endorsed slavery and waged an imperialist war against Mexico. His defense of the private, individual conscience against the expediency of the majority found expression in his most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience, Solitude and Life Without Principle,” which was first published in May 1849 under the title “Resistance to Civil Government.” The essay received little attention until the 20th century, when it found an eager audience. To many, its message still sounds timely: there is a higher law than the civil one, and the higher law must be followed even if a penalty ensues. So does its consequence: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” --Encyclopedia Britannica
