FALLEN AMONG THIEVES Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend?
Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters?
Why be visited by him at your own?
Are these things material to our covenant?
Leave this touching and clawing.

Let him be to me a spirit .-- EMERSON.
Malcolm Herrick was a devout disciple of Emerson.

He always spoke of him as one of the master minds that dominated humanity.

"He is the chosen Gamaliel at whose feet I could sit for ever," he would say; "on every subject he speaks well and wisely;" and once, when he was strolling through Kensington Gardens with his sister-friend, Anna Sheldon, he had electrified her by quoting a favourite passage from his essay on friendship.
"Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.

Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or look, his real sympathy.