Even before the appearance of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers — his first book — in 1849, Thoreau's reputation as a writer suffered from his close connection with Emerson. Thoreau was sometimes presented as an imitator and a lesser version of Emerson. In his satirical Fable for Critics (1848), for instance, poet and literary critic James Russell Lowell lampooned Thoreau in verse:
There comes [Thoreau], 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?
Lowell did further damage after Thoreau's death with a piece published in the October 1865 issue of the North American Review. In reviewing the volume of Thoreau's letters edited by Emerson, he began his discussion of Thoreau's work by emphasizing Emerson's influence. He went on to charge Thoreau with "so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to himself." He asserted that Thoreau had "no faculty of generalization from outside of himself"; that Thoreau condemned a world "he had never had the means of testing," had no active imagination, limited artistic control, and no sense of humor; and that he observed only what he wanted to see, grew cynical over time, was a sophist and a sentimentalizer, perverse and unhealthy in his thought. Whether any part of Lowell's harsh assessment of Thoreau was valid, it was strong criticism by an influential man, published in a respectable periodical. Lowell's words inevitably prejudiced readers, including potential readers of Thoreau's writings.
