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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: something else than a society for mutual improvement -
indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some extent
unconsciously; and if Thoreau had been a man instead of a
manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that he saw his
friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his
philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We
might remind him of his own words about love: "We should have
no reserve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that
business. But commonly men have not imagination enough to be
thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a
barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading oriental philosophers. It
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