Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/441

Rh At the instant that I seem to be saying fare well forever to one who has been my friend, I find myself unexpectedly near to him, and it is our very nearness and dearness to each other that gives depth and significance to that &quot;forever.&quot; Thus I am a helpless prisoner, and these chains I have no skill to break. While I think I have broken one link, I have been forging another.—I have not yet known a Friendship to cease, I think. I fear I have experienced its decaying. Morning, noon, and night, I suffer a physical pain, an aching of the breast which unfits me for my tasks. It is perhaps most intense at evening. With respect to Friendship I feel like a wreck that is driving before the gale, with a crew suffering from hunger and thirst, not knowing what shore, if any, they may reach, so long have I breasted the conflicting waves of this sentinent, my seams open and my timbers laid bare. I float on Friendship's sea simply because my specific gravity is less than its, but no longer that stanch and graceful vessel that careened so buoyantly over it. My planks and timbers are scattered. At most I hope to make a sort of raft of Friendship on which with a few of our treasures we may float to some land.—That aching of the breast, the grandest pain that man endures, which no ether can assuage!