earnest student of nature. He was much impressed by the courage and lofty ideals of the author of "Walden," which he found and read by chance. He began and maintained an inspiring correspondence during the last years of his teacher's life. Some of the letters written by Thoreau to this man of secluded, ennobling life have been privately published by Dr. Jones of Ann Arbor.
There was one intimate friend of Thoreau's later manhood who, after the death of Miss Sophia, became her brother's literary executor, Harrison Gray Otis Blake. Their friendship was deeply spiritual, perhaps most closely approximating Thoreau's ideal,—"mysterious cement of the soul." In the letters to Mr. Blake, which are included in the collection by Emerson in 1865 and also in "Familiar Letters," are some of Thoreau's most unreserved confessions of heart and soul. He once wrote to this friend,—"it behooves me, if I would reply, to speak out of the rarest part of myself." It has been said that their relation was wholly intellectual and impersonal but such statement is unjust. To both men, the ideals and soul-problems outweighed mere mundane matters, but there was ever a bond of warm heart-sympathy between them. Blake gave to Thoreau the devotion and rapt admiration of a pupil-friend. Blake, however, was the elder by a few months; he
