In the very inventiveness of his prose, and especially in his effort to use words in ways that recapture forgotten aspects of their original meanings, Thoreau’s prose style thus aims to restore the attentive reader to what Emerson, in his introduction to Nature, calls an “original relation to the universe.”

There is, of course, considerable irony in Thoreau’s posture of radical independence and original expression. James Russell Lowell, one of the leading literary authorities of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, rightly pointed out that Thoreau’s “notion of an absolute originality ... is an absurdity” and that a man “cannot escape in thought, any more than he can in language, from the past and the present” (Lowell, Literary Essays, vol. 1, pp. 372—373). As Lowell memorably reminded his readers, Thoreau “squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all” (Lowell, vol. 1, p. 380). All of this is true enough, and Thoreau would have readily acknowledged as much. For all his occasional posturing, he knew rather well the extent of his dependence on others. If he forgot, those who attended his lectures and read his published work reminded him often enough: “In its narrative, this book is unique,” wrote one reviewer of Walden, “in its philosophy quite Emersonian.” “It is the latest effervescence of the peculiar school, at the head of which stands Ralph Waldo Emerson,” wrote another. Newspaper reviews of Thoreau’s lectures in and around New England are unrelenting in their description of Thoreau as a kind of minor Emerson. As ever, Lowell himself cut to the quick, damning Thoreau with faint praise: “Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable” (Lowell, vol. 1, p. 285).

It was indeed Emerson who encouraged Thoreau to begin a journal; Emerson who inspired Thoreau with his early lectures and addresses; Emerson who invited Thoreau into the family home after his experiment as a schoolteacher failed; Emerson who allowed Thoreau the temporary use of his property on Walden Pond. Thoreau had the great good fortune to meet and come under Emerson’s influence just as Emerson came into his own intellectually and artistically. Still, as extraordinary as this almost daily contact must have been, it could not have been easy for the young and ambitious Thoreau. Emerson was a phenomenon, and Thoreau knew him just as he began to achieve that reputation. Only twelve years older than Thoreau, Emerson had made a splash in his early to mid-thirties with the 1836 publication of Nature and the delivery of a series of electrifying and often controversial lectures, including “The American Scholar,” delivered to Thoreau’s graduating class at Harvard in 1837, and the Divinity School “Address,” also delivered at Harvard in 1838. Since the mid-1830s Emerson had been conducting popular Lyceum lecture series—a kind of early adult education system—on such topics as “English Literature,” “Philosophy of History,” “Human Life,” and “The Present Age.” Emerson published his first volume of collected essays in 1841, and a second volume followed in 1844. Thoreau moved into the Emerson household just as the first volume was being published; he moved in again, just a month after leaving the cabin at Walden Pond, when Emerson left to make his tour of England and France in 1847.

By then, while Emerson’s career was in full swing, Thoreau was adjusting to his own literary disappointments. He had written a great deal while living at Walden: In addition to his regular journal, he completed two drafts of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and a preliminary draft of Walden itself. He was having no luck, however, securing a publisher for A Week, an account of a two-week river expedition he undertook in the summer of 1839 in a homemade boat with his older brother, John. Discovering little prospect of seeing the book into print, and already well advanced on what would become Walden, Thoreau finally agreed to pay the cost of publication from royalties received from the book’s sales. Published in 1849, A Week received mixed reviews and sold poorly, leaving Thoreau the then considerable debt of some $300, which it took him four and a half years to repay. After he took possession of 706 unsold copies of the original 1,000-volume print run, he quipped, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself” (Borst, The Thoreau Log, p. 266).

Thoreau was nearly thirty-two years old when his first book was published; he was thirty-six when he took possession of its unsold stock. He had by then been at work on Walden for eight years; indeed, he was by 1853 at work on the fifth of eight drafts of the ever-expanding Walden manuscript. He was a steady worker but had other responsibilities besides writing.