Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/334

300 two significant facts must be noted. In the first place, interest in his writings began fifty years ago and has grown steadily, even before the impulse of the last two decades. Literary comets do not thus quietly appear and remain. In the second place, while his books concentre about nature, they treat a second subject of equal import to humanity in all ages,—strong thoughts on the economy, morality, and true use of life.

Seldom has an author met less response from publishers and public during lifetime to win, as if by compensation, such cumulative interest after his death. As a result of twenty-five years of writing, he published only two books. The literary history of those decades, however, reveals almost parallel cases of defeat, or slowly-gained success. It was the critical childhood of American literature and her offspring could not be granted too great freedom or praise until their health had been tested. The survival of the fittest finds oft example in American literature of the last century. Had Bryant, Emerson, or Hawthorne died at Thoreau's age, forty-five, they would have had scarcely more recognition during their lives. Complacent as was Thoreau, this constant failure to win publishers in Boston and New York discouraged, and then disgusted, him. While his chief joy was in the