It should be cause to lay down one’s life, — which would not be to lose it. Can there be any mistake up there? Don’t the gods know where to invest their wealth? Such confidence, too, would be reciprocal. When one confides greatly in you, he will feel the roots of an equal trust fastening themselves in him. When such trust has been received or reposed, we dare not speak, hardly to see each other; our voices sound harsh and untrustworthy. We are as instruments which the Powers have dealt with. Through what straits would we not carry this little burden of a magnanimous trust! Yet no harm could possibly come, but simply faithlessness. Not a feather, not a straw, is entrusted; that packet is empty. It is only committed to us, and, as it were, all things are committed to us.

The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, — the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker’s lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated. The gods cannot misunderstand, man cannot explain. We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love. How much more full is Nature where we think the empty space is than where we place the solids! — full of fluid influences. Should we ever communicate but by these? The spirit abhors a vacuum more than Nature. There is a tide which pierces the pores of the air. These aerial rivers, let us not pollute their currents. What meadows do they course through? How many fine mails there are which traverse their routes! He is privileged who gets his letter franked by them.

I believe these things.

HENRY D. THOREAU

And now comes the first Emersonian reply, — hardly a reply to either of these letters, of which only one had been received February 4-11, when Emerson wrote from the Carlton House, a NewYork hotel.

III. EMERSON TO THOREAU.

NEW YORK, February, 1843.

MY DEAR HENRY, — I have yet seen no new men in New York (excepting young Tappan); but only seen again some of my old friends of last year. Mr. [Albert] Brisbane has just given me a faithful hour and a half of what he calls his principles; and he shames truer men by his fidelity and zeal. Already he begins to hear the reverberation of his single voice from most of the States of the Union. He thinks himself sure of W. H. Channing (2) as a good Fourierist. I laugh incredulous while he recites (for it seems always as if he was repeating paragraphs out of his master’s book) descriptions of the self-augmenting potency of the solar system, which is destined to contain one hundred and thirty-two bodies, I believe, and his urgent inculcation of our stellar duties. But it has its kernel of sound truth; and its insanity is so wide of New York insanities that it is virtue and honor.

February 10.

I beg you, my dear friend, to say to those faithful lovers of me who have just sent me letters which any man should be happy and proud to receive — I mean my mother and my wife — that I am grieved they should have found my silence so vexatious. I think that some letter must have failed, for I cannot have let ten days go by without writing home. I have kept no account, but am confident that that cannot be. Mr. Mackay has just brought me his good package, and I will not at this hour commence a new letter, but you shall tell Mrs.