Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/90

76 to depart. And now this morning I feel that it is too late to speak of the trifle, and besides I doubt now, in the cool morning, if I have a right to suppose such intimate and serious relations as afford a basis for the apology I had conceived, for even magnanimity must ask this poor earth for a field. The virtues even wait for invitation. Yet I am resolved to know that one centrally, through thick and thin, and though we should be cold to one another, though we should never speak to one another, I will know that inward and essential love may exist under a superficial coldness, and that the laws of attraction speak louder than words. My true relation this instant shall be my apology for my false relation the last instant. I made haste to cast off my injustice as scurf. I own it less than another. I have absolutely done with it. Let the idle and wavering and apologizing friend appropriate it. Methinks our estrangement is only like the divergence of the branches which unite in the stem.

To-night I heard Mrs. lecture on womanhood. The most important fact about the lecture was that a woman gave it, and in that respect it was suggestive. Went to see her afterward. But the interview added nothing to the impression, rather subtracted from it. She was a woman in the too common sense, after all.