Have just read “Counterparts, or The Cross of Love,” by the author of “ Charles Auchester.” It is very interesting — its illustration of Love and Friendship — as showing how much we can know of each other through sympathy merely, without any of the ordinary information.
You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can. (How language is always found to serve best the highest moods, and expression of the highest truths!) If he wished to conceal something from you it would be apparent. It is as if a bird told you. Something of moment occurs. Your friend designs that it shall be a secret to you. Vain wish! You will know it, and his design. He says consciously nothing about it, yet as he is necessarily affected by it, its effect is visible to you. From this effect you infer the cause.
Have you not already anticipated a thousand possible accidents? Can you be surprised? You unconsciously through sympathy make the right supposition. No other will account for precisely this behavior. You are disingenuous, and yet your knowledge exceeds the woodcraft of the cunningest hunter. It is as if you had a sort of trap, knowing the haunts of your game, what lures attract it and its track, etc. You have foreseen how it will behave when it is caught, and now you only behold what you anticipated.
Sometimes from the altered manner of our friend, which no cloak can possibly conceal, we know that something has happened, and what it was, all the essential particulars, though it would be a long story to tell, — though it may involve the agency of four or five persons who never breathed it to you. Yet you are sure, as if you had detected all their tracks in the wood. You are the more sure because, in the case of love, effects follow their causes more inevitably than usual, this being a controlling power. Why, a friend tells all with a look, a tone, a gesture, a presence, a friendliness. He is present when absent.
In the composition it is the greatest art to find out as quickly as possible which are the best passages you have written, and tear the rest away to come at them. Even the poorest parts will be most effective when they serve these, as pediments to the column.
How much the writer lives and endures in coming before the public so often! A few years or books are with him equal to a long life of experience, suffering, etc. It is well if he does not become hardened. He learns how to bear contempt and to despise himself. He makes, as it were, post-mortem examinations of himself before he is dead. Such is art.
P. M. — The rain ceases, and it clears up at 5 P. M. It is a warm west wind and a remarkably soft sky, like plush; perhaps a lingering moisture there. What a revelation the blue and the bright tints in the west again, after the storm and darkness! It is the opening of the windows of heaven after the flood!
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 20, 1859
A friend tells all with a look, a tone, a gesture, a presence. See December 21, 1851 ("Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that results to two or more individuals who from constitution sympathize; and natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin."); October 23, 1852 ("My friend is one whom I meet, who takes me for what I am.") ; January 27, 1854 ("I have some good friends who neither care what I think nor mind what I say. The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."); February 19, 1857 ("A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend."). Compare June 11, 1855 ("What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me"); March 28, 1856 ("Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that."): February 8, 1857 ("I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well founded."); November 3, 1858 ("How long we will follow an illusion! On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find that I had imagined something that was not there.. . . Thus I am taught that my friend is not an actual person. When I have withdrawn and am alone, I forget the actual person and remember only my ideal. Then I have a friend again ");
It is the greatest art to find out as quickly as possible which are the best passages you have written, and tear the rest away. See April 8, 1854 ("I find that I can criticise my composition best when I stand at a little distance from it.") ;See March 1, 1854 (" In correcting my manuscripts, . . . having purified the main body and thus created a distinct standard for comparison, I can review the rejected sentences and easily detect those which deserve to be readmitted.")
How much the writer lives and endures in coming before the public so often! -- On February 22-23 HDT was to deliver two lectures -- "Autumnal Tints" and the "Maine Woods" -- in Blake's parlor in Worcester. See Thoreau's Lectures after Walden.
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