Page:Some unpublished letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau; a chapter in the history of a still-born book.djvu/140

 Our last glimpse of Thoreau's Western correspondent shall be a fragment from one of his letters to Thoreau's sister, Sophia.

"I often meet your brother in my dreams and with this peculiarity about these meetings: while, as you know, our night-visions are often abnormal, grotesque, and disappointing, in this case I uniformly find my high ideal of him while [I am] awake, fully sustained. Occasionally he has become as it were transfigured to me, beyond my power to describe. So I have for some time been in the habit of associating him with the North pole-star, as through every hour of the twenty-four it keeps its one position in the heavens."

It is much to have inspired such a friendship, and it passeth riches to have been capable of such an inspiration. It fitly marks an epoch in a man's life.