66 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
which engages me, and should rejoice at an op¬ 
portunity so to do, I felt that it would be to 
make myself the laughing stock of the scien¬ 
tific community to describe to them that branch 
of science which specially interests me, inas¬ 
much as they do not believe in a science which 
deals with the higher law. So I was obliged to 
speak to their condition and describe to them 
that poor part of me which alone they can un¬ 
derstand. The fact is T am a mystic, a tran- 
scendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot. 
Now I think of it, I should have told them at 
once that I was a transcendentalist; that would 
have been the shortest way of telling them 
that they would not understand my explana¬ 
tions. How absurd that though I probably 
stand as near to Nature as any of them, and 
am by constitution as good an observer as 
most, yet a true account of my relation to na¬ 
ture should excite their ridicule only. If it 
had been the secretary of an association of 
which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I 
should not have hesitated to describe my studies 
at once and particularly. 
- March 5, 1856. To Carlisle, surveying. I 
had two friends. The one offered me friend¬ 
ship on such terms that I could not accept it 
without a sense of degradation. He would not 
meet me on equal terms, but only be to some 
