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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at
the centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals
directly with his experiences, teaches him the lessons of his
own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his
biography. So says Goethe:
"Spat erklingt was fruh erklang;
Gluck und Ungluck wird Gesang."
Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he
had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in
good books. He said well, "Life is not habitually seen from
any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the
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