Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

In the late volume giving memorials of one of the last of the Transcendentalists, Daniel Ricketson, of New Bedford, there are interesting glimpses of the time when Lowell's article on Thoreau was supposed to have wellnigh suppressed him as an author. Thoreau's sister wrote to Ricketson, it seems, “I have too much respect for Mr. Lowell's powers of discrimination to account at all for ris blundering and most unfriendly attack upon Henry's book,” and Ricketson himself adds, “Lowell's nature is wholly inadequate to take in Thoreau. Lowell thought Thoreau was posing for effect. I am satisfied that Thoreau could not possibly play a part.” He then winds up with one of those seemingly daring combinations with which the Transcendentalists innocently startled more decorous ears: “I rank Christ Jesus, Socrates, and Thoreau as the sincerest souls that ever walked the earth.”

“ In literature nothing counts but genius,” yet the length of time which sifts out genius is an uncertain quantity. In the Boston of that period it was fancied quite easy thus to sift it out — but it proved that while men were right in attributing this gift to Emerson,