If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for
not having visited him, and waste his time and deface
your own act? Visit him now. Let him feel that the
highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest
organ. Or why need you torment yourself and friend by
secret self-reproaches that you have not assisted him
or complimented him with gifts and salutations heretofore?
Be a gift and a benediction. Shine with real light and not
with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common men are
apologies for men; they bow the head, excuse themselves
with prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances because
the substance is not.

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship
of magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because he is
not a president, a merchant, or a porter. We adore an
institution, and do not see that it is founded on a
thought which we have. But real action is in silent
moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible
facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our
acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent
thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life and says,--'Thus hast
thou done, but it were better thus.' And all our after
years, like menials, serve and wait on this, and according
to their ability execute its will. This revisal or
correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency,
reaches through our lifetime. The object of the man, the
aim of these moments, is to make daylight shine through
him, to suffer the law to traverse his whole being without