When still a young man, Thoreau resolved to seek a retreat in the woods where he could live undisturbed in his enjoyment of the "indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature." Emerson, a close friend in whose house he had lived for a time, granted him the use of some land near Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from Concord. Thoreau cleared the woodland site himself and erected a small shelter, at whose "raising" a number of notable literary men were present. Beginning with the summer of 1845, this philosopher with the "thin, penetrating, big-nosed face," the deep-set eyes and spare, long-limbed figure, this naturalist who used neither trap nor gun, lived in his hut, remaining for about two years. He planted enough ground to give him food, and often received his friends, who sincerely loved him for his unique qualities of mind and soul.
At Walden Thoreau compiled and wrote two of his best-known books--"A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and "Walden, or Life in the Woods." The latter has gone into many editions in several languages.
Thoreau avowed, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life." So he lived, a happy stoic, beside his little lake. "A lake," said he, "is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth's eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.... It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh, ... swept by the sun's hazy brush." In the solitude of his days the lake-dweller found himself "no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a bumble-bee. I am no more lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or the first spider in a new house." He describes with affection "the old settler and original proprietor who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods"; and that "elderly dame" who lived in his neighborhood, "invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll some times, gathering samples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequaled fertility. Her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact everyone is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet."