the harbinger[307] of a greater friend.

23. I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them
where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on
our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I
cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes
me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days,
presentiments hover before me, far before me in the firmament. I ought
then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go
out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding
into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light.
Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and
study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a
certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual
astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with
you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my
mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I
can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall
regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side
again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new
visions, not with yourself but with your lusters, and I shall not be
able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my
friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, not
what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which
properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they
shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet
as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.

24. It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the