Page:Friendship, love & marriage (1910) Thoreau.djvu/37

 The lover learns at last there is no person quite transparent and trustworthy, but every one has a devil in him that is capable of any crime in the long run. Yet, as an Oriental philosopher has said, "Although Friendship between good men is interrupted, their principles remain unaltered. The stalk of the lotus may be broken, and the fibers remain connected."

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without. There may be courtesy, there may be even temper and wit and talent and sparkling conversation, there may even be good will—and yet the humanest and divinest faculties pine for exercise Our life without love is like coke and ashes. Men may be as pure as alabaster and Parian marble, elegant as a Tuscan villa, sublime as Niagara; and yet if there is no milk mingled with the wine at their entertainments, better is the hospitality of Goths and Vandals. My Friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother. I see his nature groping yonder so like mine. We do not live far apart. Have not the Fates associated us in many ways? Is it of no significance that we have so long partaken of the same loaf, drank at the same fountain, breathed the same air. Summer and Winter felt the same heat and cold; that the same fruits have been pleased to refresh us both, and we have never had a thought of different fiber the one with the other?

Nature doth have her dawn each day,

But mine are far between;

Content, I cry, for sooth to say,

Mine brightest are I ween.

31