The world is a fit theatre to-day in which any part may be acted. There is this moment proposed to me every kind of life that men lead anywhere, or that imagination can paint. By another spring I may be a mail-carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River, or a Canton merchant, or a soldier in Florida, or a mackerel fisher off Cape Sable, or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent navigator of any sea. So wide is the choice of parts, what a pity if the part of Hamlet be left out!

As Thoreau recognized in 1840, America was not a land likely to produce Hamlets. The mood of the country was expansionist and brash, the summons of the West being responded to with fervor and the needed technology for a bustling nation rapidly developing. 'Puritan fanatics like Goodyear brought to the vulcanization of rubber the same intense passion that Thoreau brought to Nature', Lewis Mumford has observed (The Golden Day), and it hardly needs adding that the national passion which was to gain the ascendancy was decisively that for rubber.