Emerson predicted that Thoreau’s usefulness would lead to the creation of a profession of naturalist. Emerson thought we must one day have a naturalist in each village as invariably as a lawyer or doctor, who answered all questions for a stipulated fee (Glick 195). But the best part of Thoreau is not the naturalist part of him, for he was that only obliquely, only by indirection. For somewhere along Concord’s path, he took a shortcut past Walden Pond in all of this business of living, lost his way home, then spent the rest of his life trying to find it again, spent the rest of his two.score and four years poking and looking about the interstices of Walden and Merrimac and Concord trying to find or get back something which, perhaps, never was his to begin with. He became a naturalist along the way, almost as if by default, since he had given up the great, common world of things …