So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent. I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere,-for I have had a little experience in that business,-that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country,-and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. A man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on Slavery but on conversing with him, I found that he and his clique expected seven-eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and only one-eighth mine so I declined. They never will go to law for my meat they prefer the shell. Commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know how many acres I make of their land,-since I am a surveyor,-or, at most, what trivial news I have burdened myself with. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

I would have had him deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does. There was, in this sense, no truly central or centralizing thought in the lecture. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. 484-495.) where it was given its modern title.ĪT a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done.

It was first published in the October 1863 issue of The Atlantic Monthly ( Volume 12, Issue 71, pp. He delivered it several times over the next two years, and edited it for publication before he died in 1862. This essay was derived from the lecture 'What Shall It Profit?', which Thoreau first delivered on 6 December 1854, at Railroad Hall in Providence Rhode Island.

Life without principle torrent