Virtue

You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments?  Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous.  The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

-       Thoreau[1]

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[1] Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. His parents were John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. He was named for a deceased uncle, David Thoreau; although he never legally changed his name, he began to call himself “Henry David” in college.  Henry studied at Harvard from 1833-1837, at the conclusion of which he famously declined to pay the $5 necessary for his diploma.

After Harvard, Henry returned to Concord and joined the faculty of Concord Academy. He became acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson (see footnote 145), who took him under his wing—advising him, encouraging him to write and introducing him to a circle of local literary characters: Ellery Channing Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Dismissed from Concord Academy for refusing to administer corporal punishment, Henry (with his brother John) opened a progressive grammar school which included novel elements such as nature walks and visits to businesses. In 1841, he moved into the Emerson household, where he tutored the children, helped Emerson edit, and assisted with groundskeeping. In 1842, his brother died of tetanus (he had cut himself while shaving). Henry shut their school. In 1843, he moved into the William Emerson household in Staten Island, tutoring and writing for New York City newspapers.

Thoreau soon returned to Concord and went to work in the family pencil factory—a job he kept for most of the rest of his life. He helped improve the pencil-making process. Later, he converted the factory to produce graphite used in ink typesetting machines. But Henry was restless. He wanted to buy a farm where he could support himself while having the solitude he sought to work on his first book. In 1845, he compromised, moving to the outskirts of town on some land owned by Emerson. Here he built himself a house in secondary growth forest near Walden Pond.

A year later Henry spent the night in jail for refusing to pay taxes, on the basis of his opposition to the Mexican-American war. The experience made a deep impression on him; his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience) explained his reasoning. While at Walden Pond, Henry also wrote and self-published an elegy to his brother, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Most of the copies went unsold, and Henry found himself deep in debt. He had self-published on the advice of Emerson; this caused a rift between the two that never really healed.

In 1847 Henry left Walden Pond. He worked for several years to pay off his printing debt. He also worked on the manuscript he had started in the “wilderness”; in 1854 he published Walden, or Life in the Woods. The remainder of his life centered on two main themes: natural history and abolition. He made several trips to explore the environment in different parts of New England and the Great Lakes, and recorded minute observations of the natural world in his home township. His Plea for Captain John Brown made the Harpers Ferry raider a hero in the North.

Henry had first contracted tuberculosis in 1835, and he suffered from the effects on and off the rest of his life. He had a setback in 1859, and was soon bedridden. Realizing he would not recover, he worked feverishly to revise and edit his works. He died in 1862.  (Source: Wikipedia)