412 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1859,
conquering hero comes ! You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only. Provided you think well, the heavens falling, or the earth gaping, will be music for you to march by. No foe can ever see you, or you him ; you cannot so much as think of him. Swords have no edges, bullets no penetration, for such a con test. In your mind must be a liquor which will dissolve the world whenever it is dropt in it. There is no universal solvent but this, and all things together cannot saturate it. It will hold the universe in solution, and yet be as translu cent as ever. The vast machine may indeed roll over our toes, and we not know it, but it would rebound and be staved to pieces like an empty barrel, if it should strike fair and square on the smallest and least angular of a man s thoughts.
You seem not to have taken Cape Cod the right way. I think that you should have perse vered in walking on the beach and on the bank, even to the land s end, however soft, and so, by long knocking at Ocean s gate, have gained ad mittance at last, better, if separately, and in a storm, not knowing where you would sleep by night, or eat by day. Then you should have given a day to the sand behind Provincetown, and ascended the hills there, and been blown on considerably. I hope that you like to remember the journey better than you did to make it.
