Whether he felt himself losing his identity at his commencement, or whether this was in reaction to or in fear of his falling into the pull of Emerson’s orbit, it was something with which Emerson would agree, and which he made explicit in his address: “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”7
Friends and followers came to Concord to meet with Emerson, often commenting on Thoreau as an Emerson wannabe. Among those present in July 1838 was James Russell Lowell, briefly suspended from Harvard, who found it “exquisitely amusing” to see how Thoreau “imitates Emerson’s tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart.”8 A decade later Lowell was even more stringently satirical in A Fable for Critics, in which he wrote,
There comes ——, 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?9
But Lowell wasn’t alone in seeing Thoreau adopting Emersonian characteristics. David Haskins Greene, Thoreau’s Harvard classmate, was
quite startled by the transformation that had taken place in him. His short figure and general caste of countenance were, of course, unchanged; but in his manners, in the tones and inflections of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Mr. Thoreau’s college voice bore no resemblance to Mr. Emerson’s, and was so familiar to my ear that I could readily have identified him by it in the dark. I was so much struck with the change, and with the resemblance in the respects referred to between Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau, that I remember to have taken the opportunity as they sat near together, talking, of listening to their conversation with closed eyes, and to have been unable to determine with certainty which was speaking. It was a notable instance of unconscious imitation.10
Frank Sanborn, educator, reformer, and journalist, shortly after his move to Concord in 1853 dismissed Thoreau as “a sort of pocket edition of Mr. Emerson, as far as outward appearance goes, in coarser binding and with woodcuts instead of the fine steel-engravings of Mr. Emerson. He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose . . . He dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson. . . . He talks like Mr. Emerson and so spoils the good things which he says; for what in Mr. Emerson is charming, becomes ludicrous in Thoreau, because an imitation.”11 One journalist, on hearing his talk on “White Beans and Walden Pond,” thought Thoreau “might very probably attain to a more respectable rank, if he were satisfied to be himself, Henry D. Thoreau, and not aim to be Ralph Waldo Emerson or any body else.”12
If this was something Emerson himself recognized in the early days of their friendship—“I am very familiar with all his thoughts,—they are my own quite originally drest.”13—he soon became exasperated by the comparison which would persist long after Thoreau’s death. Emerson defended his friend: “I am sure he is entitled to stand quite alone on his proper merits. There might easily have been a little influence from his neighbors on his first writings: He was not quite out of college, I believe, when I first saw him: but it is long since I, and I think all who knew him, felt that he was the most independent of men in thought and in action.”14 Emerson had no patience for narrow views of Thoreau. “Now and then I come across a man that scoffs at Thoreau,” he told Pendleton King in 1870, “and thinks him affected. For example, Mr. James Russell Lowell is constantly making flings at him. I have tried to show him that Thoreau did things that no one could have done without high powers; but to no purpose.”15
Thoreau’s mother also saw a resemblance, although with a more maternal reference—“How much Mr. Emerson does talk like my Henry.”16
Emerson and Thoreau would take long walks together, boat on the river, have discussions alone or with others in Emerson’s circle in Emerson’s study or around the dinner table with family. On October 22, 1837, during one of their many exchanges, Emerson tried to think of people who kept journals. He could only name the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, his neighbor Amos Bronson Alcott, his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and himself. “Beside these,” he wrote the next day, “I did not last night think of another.”17 It was at this time that he asked Thoreau the question that became the first entry in Thoreau’s two-million-word journal: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”18
The journal, for both writers, was an integral part of their process. Thoreau’s journal contains around two million words, Emerson’s over three million. For both men, journals were the work of a lifetime but not their life’s work. They laid the groundwork for the lectures and essays and books that were to follow. When Thoreau and Emerson combed their journals for material, it mattered little when, where, or even what circumstance had prompted an entry, as long as the text reflected the theme of what they were currently writing. “It is surely foolish,” Emerson expressed in his journal, “to adhere rigidly to the order of time in putting down one’s thoughts, and to neglect the order of thought. I put like things together.”19
Emerson considered his journal his “Savings Bank. I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings; and fractions are worth more to me because corresponding fractions are waiting here that shall be made integers by their addition.”20 It was similar for Thoreau. “Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg,” he wrote, “by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited. Perhaps this is the main value of a habit of writing, of keeping a journal,—that so we remember our best hours and stimulate ourselves.”21
Their work habits, however, were quite different. Emerson wrote that Thoreau “knew but one secret, which was to do one thing at a time, and though he has his evenings for study, if he was in the day inventing machines for sawing his plumbago, he invents wheels all the evening and night also; and if this week he has some good reading and thoughts before him, his brain runs on that all day, whilst pencils pass through his hands.” Emerson found in himself “an opposite facility or perversity, that I never seem well to do a particular work until another is due. I cannot write the poem, though you give me a week, but if I promise to read a lecture the day after to-morrow, at once the poem comes into my head and now the rhymes will flow. And let the proofs of the Dial be crowding on me from the printer,