Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/340

 316 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1855,

TO HARRISON BLAKE (AT WORCESTER).

CONCORD, December 9, 1855.

MR. BLAKE, Thank you ! thank you for going a-wooding with me, and enjoying it, for being warmed by my wood fire. I have in deed enjoyed it much alone. I see how I might enjoy it yet more with company, how we might help each other to live. And to be admitted to Nature s hearth costs nothing. None is ex cluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

I am glad to hear that you were there too. There are many more such voyages, and longer ones, to be made on that river, for it is the water of life. The Ganges is nothing to it. Observe its reflections, no idea but is familiar to it. That river, though to dull eyes it seems terres trial wholly, flows through Elysium. What pow ers bathe in it invisible to villagers ! Talk of its shallowness, that hay-carts can be driven through it at midsummer ; its depth passeth my understanding. If, forgetting the allurements of the world, I could drink deeply enough of it ; if, cast adrift from the shore, I could with com plete integrity float on it, I should never be seen on the Mill-dam again. 1 If there is any depth in

1 The centre of Concord village, where the post-office and shops are, so called from an old mill-dam where now is a street.