the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which
can love us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that
the period of nonage,[305] of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is
passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp
heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already
see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no
friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish
alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though
you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself,
so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you
draw to you the first-born of the world, those rare pilgrims whereof
only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar
great show as specters and shadows merely.

22. It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if
so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular
views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and
though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater.
Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure
that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we
read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and
reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the
Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts.
Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us
even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are
you? Unhand me. I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O
brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform,
and only be more each other's, because we are more our own? A friend
is Janus-faced:[306] he looks to the past and the future. He is the
child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and