No later letter than this was written by Thoreau's own hand; for he
was occupied all the winter of 1861-62, when he could write, in
preparing his manuscripts for the press. Nothing appeared before his
death, but in June, 1862, Mr. Fields, then editing the _Atlantic_,
printed "Walking,"--the first of three essays which came out in that
magazine the same year. Nothing of Thoreau's had been accepted for the
_Atlantic_ since 1858, when he withdrew the rest of "Chesuncook," then
coming out in its pages, because the editor (Mr. Lowell) had made
alterations in the manuscript. In April, just before his death, the
_Atlantic_ printed a short and characteristic sketch of Thoreau by
Bronson Alcott, and in August, Emerson's funeral oration, given in the
parish church of Concord. During the last six months of his illness,
his sister and his friends wrote letters for him, as will be seen by
the two that follow.