Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

10. Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and a Changing Magazine

Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and a Changing Magazine in the early 1860s, when the Civil War escalated and the nation’s capital prepared for a possible onslaught of Confederate troops, the Atlantic had found inspiration in the majesty of the American wilderness and the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau. Offering both an escape from the daily horrors of war and a source of spiritual renewal, the wilderness reminded the nation of its shared destiny. Readers who followed Thoreau into the “marrow of nature” sought God in the natural world. Thoreau begins his Atlantic piece “Walking” with a disarming challenge: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. . . . There are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.”1 Thoreau’s distrust of institutions and governments resonated, in later generations, with such influential leaders as Mohandas Gandhi, William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy. More immediately, his essays, with their mix of anecdote and natural history, philosophy and poetry, won the praise of Ralph Waldo Emerson and of a man whom readers would affectionately call “the Grand Old Man of Nature,” John Burroughs. 10 The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. henry david thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic, June 1862 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 80 ] Thoreau’s response to the natural world might be seen as the opposite of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s embrace of the new technologies or Asa Gray’s classification of plants, which Thoreau found depressingly scientific . Emerson thought Thoreau held a pagan’s “key to every animal’s brain, every plant, every shrub.” He also had a touch of whimsy. When just a raven-haired girl, full of old Nick, Louisa May Alcott had romped through the woods with Thoreau as her tutor; he told her that fairies used cobwebs as little girls used handkerchiefs.2 The Atlantic began a long tradition of publishing nature essays with Thoreau and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who contributed essays on flowers and birds, later published in Out-Door Papers. Higginson had his disagreements with James Russell Lowell, whom he thought too finicky, but none of his complaints about Lowell matched those of Thoreau. Lowell and Thoreau could not have been more dissimilar. Despite Lowell’s soliciting work from Thoreau by way of Emerson, he thought Thoreau a narcissist—and Thoreau, who suffered the indignities of Lowell’s editing, returned the compliment . “I could excuse a man who was afraid of an uplifted fist,” he wrote Lowell, “but if one habitually manifests fear at the utterance of a sincere thought, I must think that his life is a kind of nightmare continued in broad daylight.”3 The young William Dean Howells met these literary lights on an 1860 trip to Boston. Lowell affected smoking jackets and Thoreau “fashionless trousers . . . let down too low” for “a quaint, stump figure of a man.” Both had classical features, what Howells called noble faces with “a fine aquilinity of profile.”4 And both made him feel very green. Lowell teased him for wanting to claim the seventeenth-century English essayist Sir James Howell for an ancestor, while Thoreau made no effort whatsoever at conversation. As Howells’s experience suggests, the two shared an arrogance that boded ill for collaboration. The irreparable break between the satirist and the “mystagogue”—as Lowell called Thoreau—occurred when Lowell deleted from “Chesuncook,” part of The Maine Woods, a sentence about a pine tree that may have struck him as too romantic or likely to raise the hackles of orthodox readers: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.”5 Thoreau caught the omission in the proof and asked that it be restored. Lowell ignored his request. “I have just noticed that that sentence was, in a very mean and cowardly manner, omitted,” Thoreau wrote Lowell. “I Thoreau, Burroughs, & a Changing Magazine [ 81 ] do not ask anybody to adopt my opinions, but I do expect that when they ask for them to print, they will print them, or obtain my...