Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[70] voice of Lowell, whose influence as a critic was at that time greater than Emerson's. It will always remain a puzzle why it was that Lowell, who had reviewed Thoreau's first book with cordiality in the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” and had said to me afterwards, on hearing him compared to Izaak Walton, “There is room for three or four Waltons in Thoreau,” should have written the really harsh attack on the latter which afterwards appeared, and in which the plain facts were unquestionably perverted. To transform Thoreau's two brief years of study and observation at Walden, within two miles of his mother's door, into a life-long renunciation of his fellow men; to complain of him as waiving all interest in public affairs when the great crisis of John Brown's execution had found him far more awake to it than Lowell was,--this was only explainable by the lingering tradition of that savage period of criticism, initiated by Poe, in whose hands the thing became a tomahawk. As a matter of fact, the tomahawk had in this case its immediate effect; and the English editor and biographer of Thoreau has stated that Lowell's criticism is to this day the great obstacle to the acceptance of Thoreau's writings in England. It is to be remembered, however, that Thoreau was not wholly of English but partly of French origin, and was, it might