SOURCE: “Thoreau and Lowell on ‘Vacation’: The Maine Woods and ‘A Moosehead Journal’,” in Thoreau Journal Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3, July, 1978, pp. 14-24.

In the following essay, Mott examines Lowell's satirical estimation of Henry David Thoreau in “A Moosehead Journal.”

To a man of wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a vacation, but not for a habit of life.

James Russell Lowell,“Thoreau,” 1865.

I

The antagonism between Henry David Thoreau and James Russell Lowell is an integral part of the Thoreau legend. It was Lowell's notorious essay “Thoreau,” published in the North American Review (October 1865) over three years after Thoreau's death, that reputedly set back for decades a just appreciation of Thoreau's writings both in America and in Europe.¹ The sources of the Lowell-Thoreau antipathy have been amply documented and several theories have been advanced to explain the personal aspect of Lowell's criticism...