That was the attitude of the seventies. Then had come the slow revival of the eighties. At the beginning of the decade H. G. O. Blake, into whose hands Thoreau's papers had fallen, began to publish extracts from the journals grouped according to days and seasons: _Early Spring in Massachusetts_, 1881. _Summer_, 1884, and _Winter_, 1888. The break came in the nineties. Between 1893 and 1906 were published, in addition to many individual reprints of Thoreau's books, the Riverside edition in ten volumes, the complete journal in fourteen volumes, and the definitive Walden edition in twenty volumes. A Thoreau cult had arisen that hailed him as leader and master. After all the years he had arrived at his own. In the case of no other American has there been so complete and overwhelming a reversal of the verdict of an author's own generation. Lowell devoted his whole essay to a criticism of Thoreau as a Transcendental theorist and social reformer. To-day it is recognized that fundamentally he was neither of these. His rehabilitation has come solely because of that element condemned by Lowell as a certain "modern sentimentalism about Nature." It is not alone because he was a naturalist that he has lived, or because he loved and lived with Nature: it was because he brought to the study of Nature a new manner, because he created a new nature sentiment, and so added a new field to literature. Instead of having been an imitator of Emerson, he is now seen to have been a positive original force, the most original, perhaps, save Whitman, that has contributed to American literature.