wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived.

having little or no money in the purse, and nothing in particular to interest him, he thought he would go to the woods to see the forested part of the world to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation.

wanted to enjoy an original relation to the universe, have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation