THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD
sected. Speaking of Emerson, by the way, his essay on this subject seems to me a good case in point. He gives us a lot of what you and I might irreverently call "hot air"—wonderfully written hot air—about friendship as it might be among people who lived in the stars, but it does not seem to me to have much to do with the real, practicable, warm, useful, bully good thing which, you and I know, can and does exist among exceedingly human individuals.
Of course, it may be because you are only a kid and I am only a plain, ordinary business man that we do not find ourselves capable of appreciating all that esoteric Ralph Waldoism; but it would take a great deal to convince me that my friends do not mean a heap more to me than his ever did to him, who said, "I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence." He has disciples, intellectual associates, soul comrades, no doubt, but friends? He was a genius; he was no friend.
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