Page:Friendship, love & marriage (1910) Thoreau.djvu/16

 grow narrower as we advance. How is it that we are impelled to treat our old friends so ill when we obtain new ones? The housekeeper says, "I never had any new crockery in my life but I began to break the old." I say, let us speak of mushrooms and forest-trees, rather. Yet, we can sometimes afford to remember them in private.

Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat-lightning in past Summers. Fair and flitting, like a Summer cloud, there is always some vapor in the air, no matter how long the drought; there are even April showers Surely from time to time, for its vestiges never depart, it floats through our atmosphere. It takes place, like vegetation, in so many materials, because there is such a law, but always without permanent form, though ancient and familiar as the sun and moon, and as sure to come again. The heart is forever inexperienced. They silently gather, as by magic, these never failing, never quite deceiving visions, like the bright and fleecy clouds in the calmest and clearest days The Friend is some fair, floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas. Many are the dangers to be encountered, equinoctial gales and coral-reefs, ere he may sail before the constant trades. But who would not sail through mutiny and storm, even over Atlantic waves, to reach the fabulous, retreating shores of some continent man?

Columbus has sailed Westward of these isles, by the mariner's compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts 10