Nothing is given for nothing in this
world; there can be no true love, even on your own side,
without devotion; devotion is the exercise of love, by which
it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you will
pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life,"
why then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have
months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and
yet improving intercourse as shall make time a moment and
kindness a delight.
The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of
which he had no tincture, but part in his engrossing design
of self-improvement and part in the real deficiencies of
social intercourse. He was not so much difficult about his
fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the terms of
their association. He could take to a man for any genuine
qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian
woodcutter in WALDEN; but he would not consent, in his own
words, to "feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush."
It seemed to him, I think, that society is precisely the
reverse of friendship, in that it takes place on a lower
level than the characters of any of the parties would warrant
us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant
man is of greatly less account than what you will get from
him in (as the French say) a little committee.
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