Woolf's 1917 essay “Thoreau” conveys admiration for Thoreau's philosophy and way of life at Walden Pond. Rather than join Transcendentalists in “some cooperative community,” Thoreau chose to live “in solitude with nature” (134), with which he had “an affinity” (138). His drive to simplify his life in the woods became “a method of intensification, a way of setting free the delicate and complicated machinery of the soul” (135), which led him to discover that most unsimple thing, one's self. Analyzing Thoreau's technique in select passages of Walden and making connections to Woolf's technique in fictional passages on nature demonstrates how each author uses nature philosophically to explore the self.

Part of the exploration and discovery for both Thoreau and Woolf is the capacity to see ordinary things in a truly new manner, a capacity Woolf much admired in Henry James. In a slightly negative 1908 review of Vernon Lee's The Sentimental Traveler, Woolf states that if “you will open your mind to receive all impressions and force your imagination to track down the most fugitive of suggestions, something charming and valuable, because original, will be recorded. This is perhaps the course that any sensitive mind adopts naturally, though it does not always go on to trace it out upon paper” (“The Sentimental” 158). “But what art is needed to give such perishable matter an enduring form!” she exclaims (“The Sentimental” 158); Lee does not have this art, but Woolf credits James with it. In a similar way, “When we read Walden,” she writes in her essay “Thoreau,” “we have a sense of beholding life through a very powerful magnifying glass. To walk, to eat, to cut up logs […] all these occupations when scraped clean and felt afresh prove wonderfully large and bright. The common things are so strange, the visual sensations so astonishing” that, after experiencing them alone in nature, one could not imagine living life “with the herd” and following social habits (135).