Henry David Thoreau

I think this passage was trying to point out the importance of things like art, poetry, philosophy...all of the thoughtful and emotional sides of life which people often like to think of as surreal and petty in the grand scheme of things. In our society we put very little value on these types of things, using and appreciating them only as entertainment (ie. movies, paintings, music, etc). We delusion our selves with our idea of what 'reality' is, without realizing that even still much of what we see as 'reality', isn't reality by the way we are trying to distinguish it. He points out that if we were to eliminate all of these feelings and emotions and subjective ways of thinking, we would be left with nothing, or at least nothing recognizable to us. These things are what make us human and what make up life, and are as real as the earth beneath our feet.