Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/284

 260 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1853,

done, as well as another I had sent them, be cause the editor 1 requires the liberty to omit the heresies without consulting me, a privilege California is not rich enough to bid for.

I thank you again and again for attending to me ; that is to say, I am glad that you hear me and that you also are glad. Hold fast to your most indefinite, waking dream. The very green dust on the walls is an organized vege table ; the atmosphere has its fauna and flora floating in it ; and shall we think that dreams are but dust and ashes, are always disintegrated and crumbling thoughts, and not dust - like thoughts trooping to their standard with music, systems beginning to be organized ? These expectations, these are roots, these are nuts, which even the poorest man has in his bin, and roasts or cracks them occasionally in winter evenings, which even the poor debtor retains with his bed and his pig, i. e., his idleness and sensuality. Men go to the opera because they hear there a faint expression in sound of this news which is never quite distinctly proclaimed. Suppose a man were to sell the hue, the least amount of coloring matter in the superficies of his thought, for a farm, were to exchange an absolute and infinite value for a relative and finite one, to gain the whole world and lose his own soul !

1 Of Putnam s Magazine.