Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“Introductory Note” to Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)

[125] UT “Introductory Note” to Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881) H. G. O. Blake Harrison Gray Otis Blake (1816–1898) graduated from Harvard College in 1835 and Harvard Divinity School in 1838. By the time he met Thoreau in the mid-1840s, he had left the Unitarian ministry and was an educator and private tutor in Worcester, Massachusetts. Blake and Thoreau began corresponding in 1848 after Blake, seeking “a spiritual teacher,” recognized Thoreau “as a man uniquely fitted for the task,” according to Bradley Dean (11). In his edition of their correspondence, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker (2004), Dean argues for the importance of this relationship to the maturation of Thoreau’s own thinking as well as to the expansion of his readership within a circle of Blake’s Worcester acquaintances (22–23). As Thoreau described to Blake in 1857, “I am much indebted to you because you look so steadily at the better side, or rather the true center of me (for our true center may and perhaps oftenest does lie entirely aside from us, and we are in fact eccentric,). . . . You speak as if the image or idea which I see were reflected from me to you, and I see it again reflected from you to me” (Correspondence, 298–99). When Sophia Thoreau died in 1876, Blake inherited nearly forty manuscript notebooks of Thoreau’s journals, from which he published excerpts from 1881 to 1892. His “Introductory Note” prefaces the first of these volumes . Here Blake presents Thoreau’s character and unique genius as intellectual curiosities rather than an accumulation of facts about his life. As do many of Thoreau’s friends and admirers, Blake responds to Waldo Emerson’s charge that Thoreau lacked ambition, explaining Thoreau’s “ambition [as] far higher than the ordinary.” This defense would not have surprised Emerson, who had once explained to James T. Fields that “when he [Blake] was connected with theological matters . . . ‘he believed wholly in me at that time, but one day he met Thoreau and he never came to my house afterwards’” (qtd. in Howe, 89–90). In contrast to other Thoreau friends, such as Daniel Ricketson, Blake accepted Thoreau as he was—standoffish at times, demonstrably touched by Blake’s letters at others. As Blake explained: “Geniality, thoreau in his own time [126] versatility, personal familiarity are, of course, agreeable in those about us, and seem necessary in human intercourse, but I did not miss them in Thoreau , who was . . . such an effectual witness to what is highest and most precious in life” (qtd. in Salt, 145). Blake’s publication of several volumes of Thoreau’s journal extracts, arranged seasonally, created a resurgence of both general interest in and critical attention to Thoreau’s writing, leading to “a popularity they had never enjoyed before” (Harding and Meyer, 206). Importantly, Blake revitalized Thoreau’s significance as an author: “These writings abounding in what is of deepest concern to us all, uttered with a strength of conviction to which his whole life bore witness, make it plain that Thoreau had chosen the right path for himself as few men do, that in no other way could he have served humanity so well. . . . In Thoreau’s writings we see the end for which he lived” (Blake, “Thoreau”). Yet Blake’s arbitrary method of presentation also manipulated and distorted the journals’ context and, as Robert Sattelmeyer points out, “imposed an artificial structure” on their subject matter, in addition to the fact that Blake was a careless editor who defaced and often obliterated Thoreau’s text by heavily marking the manuscript leaves and by losing at least one journal notebook (“General Introduction,” 583). Sattelmeyer further contends that “despite Blake’s desire to portray the philosophical side . . . the seasonal books maintained and advanced the popular estimation of Thoreau as a progenitor of American natural history writing, a Yankee version of Gilbert White whose Selborne was Concord, Massachusetts” (584). More than any other correspondent, Blake clearly inspired Thoreau to heights of exuberance and insight. As he prodded him in December 1856: “Blake! Blake! Are you awake? Are you aware what an ever-glorious morning this is? What long expected never to be repeated opportunity is now offered to get life and knowledge? For my part I am trying to wake up,—to wring slumber out of my pores;— For, generally, I take events as unconcernedly as a fence post,—absorb wet and cold like it, and am pleasantly tickled with...