ABSTRACT
The single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty-odd years of eager activity, was to discover an economy calculated to provide a satisfying life. Out of his own experience, tested in the clear light of the Greeks, he wrote a transcendental declaration of independence that may be taken as the final word of the Concord school touching the great issues of practical living. Amongst the members of the transcendental school Thoreau was the one Concord man, born and bred there, literally of the soil and loving the things of the soil. At the risk of committing a fresh futility, one may perhaps suggest that he was a Greek turned transcendental economist. Thoreau was the most widely read in Greek literature of the Concord transcendentalists; had translated Prometheus Bound, and much of Pindar; and was completely at home in the clear Greek atmosphere.
