Page:Friendship, love & marriage (1910) Thoreau.djvu/23

 you are infinitely good. I can trust you forever. I did not think that humanity was so rich. Give me an opportunity to live.

"You are the fact in a fiction—you are the truth more strange and admirable than fiction. Consent only to be what you are. I alone will never stand in your way.

"This is what I would like: to be as intimate with you as our spirits are intimate, respecting you as I respect my ideal. Never to profane one another by word or action, even by a thought. Between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance.

"I have discovered you; how can you be concealed from me?"

The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams.

Though the poet says, T is the pre-eminence of Friendship to impute excellence," yet we can never praise our Friend, nor esteem him praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any behavior or ever treat us well enough That kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere can least of all consist with this relation, and no such affront can be offered to a Friend, as a conscious good will, a friendliness which is not a necessity of the Friend's nature.

The sexes are naturally most strongly attracted to one another, by constant constitutional differences, and are most commonly and surely the complements of one another How natural and easy it is for man to secure the attention of woman to what interests himself  Men and 17