'How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.'

Walden Pond is a 102 foot- (31 metre)-deep lake in Concord, Massachusetts in the United States. A famous example of a kettle hole*, it was formed by retreating glaciers 10,000–12,000 years ago. *A kettle (kettle hole, pothole) is a shallow, sediment-filled body of water formed by retreating glaciers or draining floodwaters.

The writer, transcendentalist, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau lived on the northern shore of the pond for two years starting in the summer of 1845. His account of the experience was recorded in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, and made the pond famous. The land at that end was owned by Thoreau's friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who let Thoreau use it for his experiment.

Henry David Thoreau ( 1817 – 1862 ) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Walden - an annotated edition by Henry David Thoreau – 1854 @ http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html