1. Henry David Thoreau
Walden

2. Enacting Transcendentalism: Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau, a Harvard valedictorian, struggled to find his purpose in life. He didn’t want to take over his father’s pencil factory and the school he started failed because he refused to beat his students.
Emerson let Thoreau use a parcel of land and a primitive shack on Walden pond. Thoreau lived there for over two years and penned Walden, after which Thoreau became an eminent transcendental thinker and activist
Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because he disagreed with America’s use of tax dollars to support the Mexican-American War, for which he was arrested while on a huckleberry picking party. After his release, he delivered his most famous and influential speech: “Resistance to Civil Government.”

3. Enacting Transcendentalism: Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau continued to work as an abolitionist – he even defended John Brown at his hanging for treason – and as a reporter on the Civil War for The Atlantic Monthly, but he never changed his philosophy that in order to be complete and attuned to ourselves, we need to spend time in nature daily.
Thus Thoreau concludes “Resistance to Civil Government” with a desire to return to his huckleberry picking party and Edward Emerson remembers Thoreau as
“the best kind of an older brother. He soon became the guide and companion of our early expeditions afield, and, later, the advisor of our first camping trips.”
And “As the children grew older, he led them to choice huckleberry hills, swamps where the great high-bush blueberries grew, guided to the land of the chestnut and barberry, and more than all, opened that land of enchantment into which, among dark hemlocks, blood- red maples, and yellowing birches, we floated in his boat, and freighted it with leaves and blue gentians and fragrant grapes from the festooning vines.”

4. Walden
 ”’Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.’ [Confucius] I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey”

5. Walden
 ”I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”