What would Thoreau have said, could lie have been forewarned, on that evening, that within half-a-century the foremost of American publishing firms would be planning all edition of his works in twenty volumes; that an original copy of his rejected look, the Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, would sell for ten guineas; and that scraps of his handwriting would fetch more than their weight it gold—for this is literally what has happened to the reputation of the “Yankee Diogene;” and the “Rural Humbug,” as his contemporaries styled him? Of fall the Concord group it is beginning to be seen that Thoreau, the least regarded in his lifetime, will live the longest in the end, by virtue of that rare, pungent, aboriginal flavor of his, which may attract or repel, according to the taste of the reader, but will in no wise suffer itself to be forgotten.
Henry S. Salt
Fortnightly Review, Vol. 83, June 1908
Download: Thoreau in Twenty Volumes (pdf)
More by Henry Salt
- Thoreau’s Poetry, Art Review (London), May 1890
- Henry D. Thoreau, Temple Bar, November 1886
- Henry D. Thoreau, Justice, November 14, 1885
- David Henry Thoreau: A Centenary Essay, The Humanitarian, January-April 1917
- Thoreau and the Simple Life, The Humane Review, October 1906