no illusions; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but
preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities. A more
bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom been
presented. He is an egoist; he does not remember, or does not think it
worth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we are
ninety-nine times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we
are disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently
undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend's
conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh
endeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is
after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly; but still profit to
himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively,
"my education cannot dispense with your society." His education! as
though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word about
pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It
was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the
fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: "As
for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an
elm-tree!"

As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his
intimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of
intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what
else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's,
"nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and
even then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some
afterthought of self-improvement, as though you had come to the cricket
match to bet. It was his theory that people saw each other too
frequently, so that their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had
they anything fresh to communicate; but friendship must be something
else than a society for mutual improvement--indeed, it must only be
that by the way, and to some extent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had
been a man instead of a manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that he
saw his friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his
philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We might remind
him of his own words about love: "We should have no reserve; we should
give the