Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/89

AET. 25.] TO R. W. EMERSON. 65 [A part of the same letter, though bearing a date two days later, and written in a wholly different style, as from one sage to another, is this postscript.]

February 12, 1843.

,—As the packet still tarries, I will send you some thoughts, which I have lately relearned, as the latest public and private news.

How mean are our relations to one another! Let us pause till they are nobler. A little silence, a little rest, is good. It would be sufficient employment only to cultivate true ones.

The richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. We hate the kindness which we understand. A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gratitude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remote parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me. When such divine commodities are so near and cheap, how strange that it should have to be each day’s discovery! A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me. I am no more of this earth;