Great poets and seers do not write for classrooms or scholars; they write for other people, other souls. I call to witness Leo Tolstoy, who dropped out of school; Virginia Woolf, who was not allowed to go to school; and Charles Dickens, who was expelled from school. Although Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) did indeed graduate from Harvard, he thought so little of it that he refused to pay the six dollars required to receive his diploma. Like Tolstoy and Woolf, he wrote his most intimate thoughts—some of them never intended to be known to the world—in his journals and diaries. His “Walden” diary (1845–47), conceived with publication in mind, is slightly more self-conscious than the rest of the two-million-word document begun in 1837, when the author was just 20. The complete opus reveals the soul of the man, and a beautiful soul it was. There were hints of its beauty …