On May 6, 1862, Thoreau died in his parents' home in Concord. A man of admirable spirit, he passed out of the world with typical Thoreauvian humor: when a friend asked him if he had made amends with God, Thoreau quipped, "I did not know that we had ever quarreled."
When Thoreau died, scarcely anyone in America noticed, and the few that did mourn his passing would have been surprised to learn that, a century later, he would be unanimously acknowledged as one of America's greatest literary artists. George W. Curtis did not understate the matter when he wrote in Thoreau's obituary that "the name of Henry Thoreau is known to very few persons beyond those who personally knew him." Thoreau had fervently devoted himself to the pursuit of a literary career in the late 1830s, but after thirty years of intense effort in his art, he died a failure by contemporary standards of success. In his eulogy at Thoreau's funeral, Emerson declared that "the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost," and it was not until the twentieth century was well under way that Thoreau came to be recognized as the genius that he was.
What little recognition Thoreau did receive during the latter half of the nineteenth century was strongly colored by some unfortunate remarks made by Emerson and James Russell Lowell, two very influential men in matters of literary taste. Both men published essays on Thoreau shortly after his death and virtually determined for quite some time what the public's attitude toward Thoreau would be. While supposedly eulogizing Thoreau, Emerson managed to emphasize every negative trait that he had found (or imagined) in Thoreau's personality. One sees in his portrait of Thoreau an almost inhuman ascetic and stoic ("He had no temptations to fight against — no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles") and a somewhat cranky, anti-social hermit ("Few lives contained so many renunciations. . . . It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes"). In this eulogy, Emerson also strongly emphasized Thoreau's abilities as a naturalist, and thus established the image of Thoreau-the-nature-lover (in the worst sense of the term) that was to obscure his primary significance as an artist for quite some time. Three years later, in 1865, James Russell Lowell published his essay on Thoreau, and reinforced Emerson's caricature of Thoreau as a cold, brittle, anti-social recluse. He wrote that Thoreau "seems to me to have been a man with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to himself. . . . His mind strikes us as cold and wintry. This was a damning indictment, but even more detrimental to Thoreau's reputation was Lowell's assertion that Thoreau was merely a minor Emerson, an imitator of his mentor. In A Fable for Critics, Lowell depicted a Thoreau who trod "in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short." In addition, he opened the essay on Thoreau with a similar gibe:
Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable; and it is something eminently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are strawberries from his own garden.
