The Universalist Quarterly reviews of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:
[It is] interspersed with inexcusable crudities, with proofs of carelessness and lack of healthy moral discrimination, with contempt for the things commonly esteemed holy, with reflections which may shock every pious Christian.
Boston, Mass. Pictorial National Library has a review of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:
Henry D. Thoreau, a young philosopher, whose primitive habits of living have attracted some attention in the vicinity of Concord, has a volume of 413 pages, entitled A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The incidents narrated are those of a cruise down the Concord River, to its junction with the Merrimack, up that river to Hookset, and thence on foot to Concord N.H. The voyage was accomplished in a boat of home manufacture, equipped with oars, sails, &c., and loaded with provisions, cooking utensils, and a tent in which to encamp at night.
Cornelius Conway Felton writes a review of Henry William Herbert’s translation of Prometheus of Aeschylus in the North American Review, comparing it with that of his former pupil, Thoreau.
