Excerpt from Selections From Thoreau: Edited, With an Introduction WE are most of us familiar with one or another of the many legendary apparitions of the alter ego, or second self, a manifestation which must have entailed considerable inconvenience on the parties whom it principally concerned. It could hardly be agreeable to a person of strong distinctive personality to feel that his astral counterpart was travelling at large about the country, and compromising him by grant ing unauthorised interviews to all sorts of busy bodies; still less, perhaps, would he relish such a startling experience as that of the magus Zoroaster, who, if the poet is to be credited, met his own image walking in the garden. But it should be noted that the annals of literature present equally interesting, and better authenticated examples of a somewhat similar phenomenon. Authors, and especi ally those of new and unappreciated genius, are not unfrequently subject to the same annoyance as Zoroaster nay, worse, for whereas the second self in the legend was at least an exact image of its original. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.