the highest confidence in Mr. Thoreau’s moral, character and in his intellectual ability. He is an excellent scholar, a man of energy and kindness, and I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his services.”2 He also wrote to Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College, trying to secure some financial aid for Thoreau by attributing his lower academic standing to illness rather than any other cause.
Thoreau’s interest in Emerson was also increasing. Having borrowed and read Emerson’s Nature from the college library twice while attending Harvard, he purchased a copy to give to his classmate William Allen, calling it, in an echo of Robert Burns’s “Epistle to a Young Friend,” “neither a sang nor a sermon.”3 He sang Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” in the choir at the dedication of the Obelisk at Concord’s North Bridge in July 1837. And then on August 31 Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address to Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard. “The American Scholar” was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes as America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”4 It spoke of and to “Man Thinking,” not an intellectual and academic cerebration, but a thinking with the entirety of soul and self-trust, culminating in the triad, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”5
At the time of his graduation, Thoreau was not yet keeping a journal, so his immediate reaction to his Harvard commencement is not known, but when he gave his first public lecture the following spring in Concord, he revisited the memory: “One goes to a cattle-show expecting to find many men and women assembled, and beholds only working oxen and neat cattle. He goes to a commencement thinking that there at least he may find the men of the country; but such, if there were any, are completely merged in the day, and have become so many walking commencements, so that he is fain to take himself out of sight and hearing of the orator, lest he lose his own identity in the nonentities around him.”6
Whether he felt himself losing his identity at his commencement, or whether this was in reaction to or in fear of his falling into the pull of Emerson’s orbit, it was something with which Emerson would agree, and which he made explicit in his address: “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”7
Friends and followers came to Concord to meet with Emerson, often commenting on Thoreau as an Emerson wannabe. Among those present in July 1838 was James Russell Lowell, briefly suspended from Harvard, who found it “exquisitely amusing” to see how Thoreau “imitates Emerson’s tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart.”8 A decade later Lowell was even more stringently satirical in A Fable for Critics, in which he wrote,
There comes ——, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,
Tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;
How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,
To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!
He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,
His fingers exploring the prophet’s each pocket.
Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,
Can’t you let neighbor Emerson’s orchards alone?9
But Lowell wasn’t alone in seeing Thoreau adopting Emersonian characteristics. David Haskins Greene, Thoreau’s Harvard classmate, was
quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in him. His short figure and general caste of countenance were, of course, unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones and inflections of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Mr. Thoreau’s college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson’s, and was so familiar to my ear that I could readily have identified him by it in the dark. I was so much struck with the change, and with the resemblance in the respects referred to between Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau, that I remember to have taken the opportunity as they sat near together, talking, of listening to their conversation with closed eyes, and to have been unable to determine with certainty which was speaking. It was a notable instance of unconscious imitation.10
Frank Sanborn, educator, reformer, and journalist, shortly after his move to Concord in 1853 dismissed Thoreau as “a sort of pocket edition of Mr. Emerson, as far as outward appearance goes, in coarser binding and with woodcuts instead of the fine steel-engravings of Mr. Emerson. He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose . . . He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson. . . . He talks like Mr. Emerson and so spoils the good things which he says; for what in Mr. Emerson is charming, becomes ludicrous in Thoreau, because an imitation.”11 One journalist, on hearing his talk on “White Beans and Walden Pond,” thought Thoreau “might very probably attain to a more respectable rank, if he were satisfied to be himself, Henry D. Thoreau, and not aim to be Ralph Waldo Emerson or any body else.”12
If this was something Emerson himself recognized in the early days of their friendship—“I am very familiar with all his thoughts,—they are my own quite originally drest.”13—he soon became exasperated by the comparison which would persist long after Thoreau’s death. Emerson defended his friend: “I am sure he is entitled to stand quite alone on his proper merits. There might easily have been a little influence from his neighbors on his first writings: He was not quite out of college, I believe, when I first saw him: but it is long since I, and I think all who knew him, felt that he was the most independent of men in thought and in action.”14 Emerson had no patience for narrow views of Thoreau. “Now and then I come across a man that scoffs at Thoreau,” he told Pendleton King in 1870, “and thinks him affected. For example, Mr. James Russell Lowell is constantly making flings at him. I have tried to show him that Thoreau did things that no one could have done without high powers; but to no purpose.”15
Thoreau’s mother also saw a resemblance, although with a more maternal reference—“How much Mr. Emerson does talk like my Henry.”16
Emerson and Thoreau would take long walks together, boat on the river, have discussions alone or with others in Emerson’s circle in Emerson’s study or around the dinner table with family. On October 22, 1837, during one of their many exchanges, Emerson tried to think of people who kept journals. He could only name the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, his neighbor Amos Bronson Alcott, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and himself. “Beside these,” he wrote the next day, “I did not last night think of another.”17 It was at this time that he asked Thoreau the question that became the first entry in Thoreau’s two-million-word journal: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”18
The
