Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/297

 JET. 36.] TO HARRISON BLAKE. 273

with no more souls to a square mile, stretching away on every side from every human being with whom you have no sympathy. Their hu manity affects me as simply monstrous. Rocks, earth, brute beasts, comparatively are not so strange to me. When I sit in the parlors and kitchens of some with whom my business brings me I was going to say in contact (business, like misery, makes strange bedfellows), I feel a sort of awe, and as forlorn as if I were cast away on a desolate shore. I think of Riley s Narrative x and his sufferings. You, who soared like a merlin with your mate through the realms of aether, in the presence of the unlike, drop at once to earth, a mere amorphous squab, divested of your air-inflated pinions. (By the way, ex cuse this writing, for I am using the stub of the last feather I chance to possess.) You travel on, however, through this dark and desert world; you see in the distance an intelligent and sym pathizing lineament ; stars come forth in the dark, and oases appear in the desert.

But (to return to the subject of coats), we are wellnigh smothered under yet more fatal coats, which do not fit us, our whole lives long. Consider the cloak that our employment or sta tion is ; how rarely men treat each other for

1 An American seaman, wrecked on the coast of Arabia, once a popular book.