the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and, as it were, in a straight line.
Who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of Tadmore of the desert? There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.
However, our fates at least are social 
Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the center Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below, blood-heat, but none of cold above it.
One or two persons come to my house from time to time, there being proposed to them the faint possibility of intercourse. They are as full as they are silent, and wait for my plectrum to stir the strings of their lyre. If they could ever come to the length of a sentence, or hear one, on that ground they are dreaming of! They speak faintly, and do not obtrude themselves They have heard some news which none, not even they themselves, can impart. It is a wealth they bear about them which can be expended in various ways. What came they out to seek?
