Colonel Higginson, who had personal knowledge of H. D. Thoreau, declares that both Channing and Lowell have done the quaint New Englander injustice in emphasizing his eccentricities and not placing sufficient stress on his vigor, good sense and clear perceptions. Colonel Higginson says that as a companion he was essentially sincere, wholesome and enjoyable. Though more or less a humorist, nursing his own whims, and capable of being tiresome when they came uppermost, he was easily led away from them to the vast domains of literature and nature, and then poured forth endless streams of the most interesting talk. His home life was thoroughly affectionate and faithful—he never made his whims an excuse for mere selfishness. His life-long celibacy, the colonel says, was due to the noblest unselfishness—an early act of lofty self-abnegation toward his own brother, whose love had taken the same direction with his own.
       — Anonymous, in Kenneth Cameron, Emerson, Thoreau and Concord in Early Newspapers (Hartford: Transcendental, 1958), p. 140.