Early Essays and Miscellanies

This collection of fifty-three early pieces by Thoreau represents the full range of his youthful imagination. Collected, arranged, and carefully edited for the first time here, the writings date from 1828 to 1852 and cover a broad range of subjects: learning, morals, literature, history, politics, and love. Included is a major essay on Sir Walter Raleigh that was not published during the author's lifetime and a fragmentary college piece here published for the first time. Titles of essays published in the volume are given below.

Early Essay?

• The Seasons
• Anxieties and Delights of a Discoverer
• Men Whose Pursuit Is Money
• Of Keeping a Private Journal
• "We Are Apt to Become What Others . . . Think Us to Be"
• Forms, Ceremonies, and Restraints of Polite Society
• A Man of Business, a Man of Pleasure, a Man of the World
• Musings
• Kinds of Energetic Character
• Privileges and Pleasures of a Literary Man
• Severe and Mild Punishments
• Popular Feeling
• Style May . . . Offend against Simplicity
• The Book of the Seasons
• Sir Henry Vane
• Literary Digressions
• Foreign Influence on American Literature
• Life and Works of Sir W. Scott
• The Love of Stories
• Cultivation of the Imagination
• The Greek Classic Poets
• The Meaning of "Fate"
• Whether the Government Ought to Educate
• Travellers & Inhabitants
• History . . . of the Roman Republic
• A Writer's Nationality and Individual Genius
• L'Allegro & Il Penseroso
• All Men Are Mad
• The Speeches of Moloch & the Rest
• People of Different Sections
• Gaining or Exercising Public Influence
• Titles of Books
• Sublimity
• The General Obligation to Tell the Truth
• "Being Content with Common Reasons"
• The Duty, Inconvenience and Dangers of Conformity
• Moral Excellence
• Barbarities of Civilized States
• T. Pomponius Atticus
• Class Book Autobiography
• "The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times"

• DIED . . . Miss Anna Jones
• Aulus Persius Flaccus
• The Laws of Menu
• Sayings of Confucius
• Dark Ages
• Chinese Four Books
• Homer. Ossian. Chaucer.
• Hermes Trismegistus . . . From the Gulistan of Saadi
• Sir Walter Raleigh
• Thomas Carlyle and His Works
• Love
• Chastity & Sensuality