Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/282

 258 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1853,

tinction we should almost all of us be seen to be in the almshouse for souls.

I am much indebted to you because you look so steadily at the better side, or rather the true centre of me (for our true centre may, and per haps oftenest does, lie entirely aside from us, and we are in fact eccentric), and, as I have elsewhere said, &quot; give me an opportunity to live.&quot; You speak as if the image or idea which I see were reflected from me to you ; and I see it again reflected from you to me, because we stand at the right angle to one another ; and so it goes zigzag to what successive reflecting surfaces, be fore it is all dissipated or absorbed by the more unreflecting, or differently reflecting, who knows? Or, perhaps, what you see directly, you refer to me. What a little shelf is re quired, by which we may impinge upon another, and build there our eyry in the clouds, and all the heavens we see above us we refer to the crags around and beneath us. Some piece of mica, as it were, in the face or eyes of one, as on the Delectable Mountains, slanted at the right angle, reflects the heavens to us. But, in the slow geological upheavals and depressions, these mutual angles are disturbed, these suns set, and new ones rise to us. That ideal which I wor shiped was a greater stranger to the mica than to me. It was not the hero I admired, but the