Harrison Gray Otis Blake was an admirer of
Ralph Waldo Emerson and a disciple of
Henry David Thoreau. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Blake was one of the young men who invited Emerson to deliver the commencement speech. Emerson’s resulting “Divinity School Address” shook the foundations of Unitarian orthodoxy and was vigorously denounced by conservative Unitarian leaders. Blake, however, so enjoyed and supported the oration that he promptly joined four fellow graduates in soliciting Emerson to publish the manuscript. In the 1850s he was active in the intellectual community in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he and other Worcester adherents—
Theophilus Brown,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
David A. Wasson, and Edward Everett Hale—eagerly met for reading and discussion when correspondence from Thoreau arrived. After Thoreau’s death Blake edited and published some of Thoreau’s writings, including numerous selections from Thoreau’s journals. He regularly attended
Amos Bronson Alcott’s Concord School of Philosophy (1879–1888), where he also gave readings.