Page:Friendship, love & marriage (1910) Thoreau.djvu/50

 "Yet, sometimes, against my will,

My dear Friend, I love thee still.

It were treason to our love,

And a sin to God above,

One iota to abate

Of a pure, impartial hate."

It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.

It must be rare, indeed, that we meet with one to whom we are prepared to be quite ideally related, as she to us. We should have no reserve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that society; we should have no duty aside from that. One who could bear to be so wonderfully and beautifully exaggerated every day.

I would take my friend out of her low self and set her higher, infinitely higher, and there know her. But, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate. They have lower engagements. They have near ends to serve. They have not imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth !

'What a difference, whether, in all your walks, you meet only strangers, or in one house is one who knows you, and whom you know ! To have a brother or a sister ! To have a gold mine on your farm! To find diamonds in the gravel-heaps before your door ! How rare these things are! To share the day with you,—to people the earth. Whether to have a god or a goddess for companion in your walks, or to walk alone with hinds and villains and carles. Would not a friend enhance the beauty of the landscape as much as a deer or hare ? Everything 44