Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/214

 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 &quot; Dial,&quot; which had then ceased for four years. In March, 1848, Mr. Blake read Tho- reau s chapter on Persius in the &quot;Dial&quot; for July, 1840, and though he had read it before, without being much impressed by it, he now found in it &quot;pure depth and solidity of thought.&quot; &quot; It has revived in me,&quot; he wrote to Thoreau, &quot; 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