"Autumn," and also a volume of selected "Thoughts." To the last week of his life, when the eye was almost past reading, he applied his mind to the work which had been his greatest inspiration and blessing.
One might search long to find two men of such moral fibre as were Thoreau and Blake,—for their characteristics in this regard were identical. At the memorial service following the death of Mr. Blake in 1898, his friend, Prof. E. Harlow Russell, to whom he has committed the Thoreau manuscripts, uttered this succinct sentence,—"He was such a man as rendered an oath in a court of justice a superfluity." Could more fitting word be found to express the moral perfection of Thoreau as well as Blake? The latter lacked the physical vigor and the vivacious instincts of his friend; he was subject to moods of depression as well as of exaltation; he was far more of a philosopher than a naturalist; he had poetic ideals but lacked the power of expressing them. Despite such minor differences his qualities of mind, heart, and soul were accordant with those of Thoreau to a degree almost incredible and unexampled. Appropriate for the epitaph of both was the title-line of a Worcester newspaper after Mr. Blake's memorial service,—"Devoted to Ideals of Highest Type."
