190 GOLDEN AGE OF ACHIEVEMENT. [1848,
class with two other young men from Concord, -E. R Hoar and H. B. Dennis. This cir cumstance may have led to Mr. Blake s visiting the town occasionally, before his intimacy with its poet-naturalist began, in the year 1848. At that time, as Thoreau wrote to Horace Greeley, he had been supporting himself for five years wholly by the labor of his hands ; his Walden hermit-life was over, yet neither its record nor the first book had been published, and Thoreau was known in literature chiefly by his papers in the " Dial," which had then ceased for four years. In March, 1848, Mr. Blake read Tho- reau s chapter on Persius in the "Dial" for July, 1840, and though he had read it before, without being much impressed by it, he now found in it "pure depth and solidity of thought." " It has revived in me," he wrote to Thoreau, " a haunting impression of you, which I carried away from some spoken words of yours. . . . When I was last in Concord, you spoke of retir ing farther from our civilization. I asked you if you would feel no longings for the society of your friends. Your reply was in substance, No, I am nothing. That reply was memorable to me. It indicated a depth of resources, a com pleteness of renunciation, a poise and repose in the universe, which to me is almost inconceiva ble ; which in you seemed domesticated, and to
