ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity
but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured
that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it
would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

5. I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old
and the new. Shall I not call God, the Beautiful, who daily showeth
himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and
yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the
noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.[280] Who hears me,
who understands me, becomes mine,--a possession for all time. Nor is
nature so poor, but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we
weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many
thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by-and-by stand
in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims
is a traditionary globe. My friends have come[281] to me unsought. The
great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of
virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, not I, but the Deity in me
and in them, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual
character, relation, age, sex and circumstance, at which he usually
connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent
lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and
enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the
first Bard[282]--poetry without stop--hymn, ode and epic,[283] poetry
still flowing, Apollo[284] and the Muses[285] chanting still. Will these
two separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but
I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by
simple affinity, and the Genius[286] of my life being thus social, the
same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these
men and women, wherever I may be.