from Essays: First Series (1841)
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Friendship
A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again, —
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
Friendship
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that
chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love
like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom
yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom,
though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-
beams. The heart knoweth.
The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In
poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are
felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift,
more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of
passionate love, to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write,
and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy
expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith, troops of gentle
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And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
Friendship
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where
virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A
commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and
pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts
that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is
exchanged for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended
stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He
stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask
how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy
with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We
have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time.
For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn
from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and
acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger
begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all
over. He has heard the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger
now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he
may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, — but the throbbing of the heart, and the
communications of the soul, no more.
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What
so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on
their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The
moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no
night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish, — all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity
but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the
universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a
thousand years.
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I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I
not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I
embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the
noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me,
becomes mine, — a possession for all time. Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this joy
several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as
many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new
world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My
friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the
divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them
derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance,
at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent
lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning
of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard, — poetry without stop, — hymn,
ode, and epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these, too,
separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my
relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being
thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men
and women, wherever I may be.
I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to
"crush the sweet poison of misused wine" of the affections. A new person is to me a great
event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have
given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born
of it; my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if
they were mine, — and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the
lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of
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our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations
less. Every thing that is his, — his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments, — fancy
enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of
love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover,
beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the
golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We
doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the
form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not
respect men as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same condition of
an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical
foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not
fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their
appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not
unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I must
hazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should
prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with his thought conceives
magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a universal success, even though bought by
uniform particular failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match
for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot
make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint,
moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you
praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at last a
poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal
includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity, — thee, also, compared with whom all
else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is, — thou art not my soul, but a
picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat
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and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently,
by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for
evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with
friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a
season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the
whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union
with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every
man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment,
he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love.
DEAR FRIEND: —
If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never
think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are
quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not
presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment.
Thine ever, or never.
Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life. They are not to
be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and
poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the
tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web
with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck
a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many
summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an
adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over
with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry
into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise,
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and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society,
even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight,
we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by
epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties
do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.
I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many friends I have, and
what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I
have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and
cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum.
Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a
delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself
before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the
naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which
Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is
the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total
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"The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."
Friendship
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worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let
us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth,
impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.
The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of
subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of
absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is
this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real,
they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so
many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has
man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly
stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from
this alliance with my brother's soul, is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but
the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a
festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that
relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up,
like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first-born of the world are the competitors.
He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is
victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from
the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the
speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles. There are
two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect
no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is
a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the
presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of
dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with
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him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.
Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that
being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man
alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend
the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We
cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, under a certain
religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke
to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty.
At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could
not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every
man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely
with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was
constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what
poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society
shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a
false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we
meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some
whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils
all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.
My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend,
therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose
existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my
being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may
well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by
blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every
circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can
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subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we
can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of
fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have
one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says, — "I offer myself faintly and
bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the
most devoted." I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It
must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a
citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a
commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighbourhood; it watches
with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and
nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a sutler,
yet, on the other hand, we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does
not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity.
I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I
much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed
amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and
dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely
that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and
comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and
graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck,
poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of
religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's life, and
embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into something usual and
settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.
Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so
happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love
demands that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very seldom be
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assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm
lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps
because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more
with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom
subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation,
which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The
best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several
times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have
one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a
conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such
discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good
company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the
several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of
brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may
then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his
own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great
conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
No two men but, being left alone with each other, enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity
that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will
never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for
conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an
evanescent relation, — no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he
cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as
much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will
mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.
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Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with
the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the
world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I
am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be
himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I
looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession.
Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high
friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime
parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two
large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the
deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness
are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not
intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the
births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our
friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a
spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must
needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount
and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart
he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest
ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-
confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble
and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your
friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by
him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and
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clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I
want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighbourly conveniences
from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure,
universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison
with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that
divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that
scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify
and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell
them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy,
untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast
aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too
near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It
suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It profanes
nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour
out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.
Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your
impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can be another's. There is at
least this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb; — you can speak to your
accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inquinat, aequat. To those whom we admire and
love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the
entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect,
until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be
silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast
about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter
how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly
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and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait
until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of
your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. You
shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster
from you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and
they repel us; why should we intrude? Late, — very late, — we perceive that no arrangements,
no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish us
in such relations with them as we desire, — but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same
degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them
then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the
reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged
names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with
flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and
fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of
the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us, and
which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of
blunders, and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp
heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike
leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience
betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path,
though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put
yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, —
those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the
vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.
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It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine
love. Whatever correction of our popular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to
bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us
feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to
Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it
out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe an old
faded garment of dead persons; the books their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give
over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying,
'Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.' Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that
thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's,
because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future.
He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of
a greater friend.
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them,
but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on
the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me
so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover before
me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I
go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which
now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to
talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain
household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come
down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing
of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to
occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, and
wish you were by my side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
visions, not with yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now to
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from
them, not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they
cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less
subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one
side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets
that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide
and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your
greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass
away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and, no longer a mate for frogs and worms,
dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love
unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends
the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed
mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the
surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The
essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or
provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.
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