HENRY THOREAU
in exchange for Heaven's blue cope, painted by the oldest Master with cloud and rainbow, and jewelled by night with his worlds and suns?
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"
sang the poet, and Thoreau, mainly to save a view of those heavens, and, that the household clatter and village hum drown not the music of the spheres, went into the woods for a time.
His lifelong friend, Mr. Harrison G. O. Blake, of Worcester, pointed out that Thoreau, feeling that the best institutions, home, school, public organization, were aimed to help the man or woman to lead a worthy life—"instead of giving himself to some profession or business, whereby he might earn those superfluities which men have agreed to call a living; instead of thus earning a position in society and so acting upon it;
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