Henry Thoreau, Bachelor of Nature by Léon Bazalgette

At the age of twenty the student Henry Thoreau left the university with his bachelor's degree. This was the recompense for four years passed away from Concord, four years save for the vacations and the time he had returned to spend with his family because of ill-health. As for this title, he may have given it its due -- he was certainly not inclined to over-value it.

Upon entering college, he had left a village environment where equality was not a joke but a daily observance -- left this environment to find himself, the child of small folk, suddenly thrown among the offspring of the fortunate ones of this world. In spite of the part-scholarship which they had obtained for him, his parents, his sister Helen, his aunts, in order to provide for the cost of his studies, had been obliged to deprive themselves. At college also, to be sure, a kind of equality prevailed among the students; but there it was an equality with a difference. He was a country boy among these wide-awake young men in whose eyes he was from the village indeed. Since his parents, his sister, had been obliged to scant themselves to purchase his right to a share of learning, he was inclined to feel certain things a little differently from the way he would have felt them if he had been the son of a senator.