as spectres and shadows
merely.

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