My coat is at last done, and my mother & sister allow that I am so far in a condition to go abroad. I feel as if I had gone abroad the moment I put it on. It is, as usual a production strange to me, the wearer, invented by some Count D’Orsay, and the maker of it was not acquainted with any of my real depressions or elevations. He only measured a peg to hang it on, and might have made the loop big enough to go over my head. It requires a not quite innocent indifference not to say insolence to wear it. Ah, the process by which we get overcoats is not what it should be. Though the church declare it righteous & its priest pardons me, my own Good Genius tells me that it is hasty & coarse & false. I expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which a man will get his coat as honestly, and as perfectly fitting as a tree its bark. Now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i.e. of the Devil, & to some extent react on us and poison us like that shirt which Hercules put on.

  I think to come & see you next week on Monday if nothing hinders. I have just returned from Court at Cambridge, whither I was called as a witness, having surveyed a water privilege about which there is a dispute since you were here.

  Ah! what foreign countries there are, greater in extent than the U.S. or Russia, and with no more souls to a square mile—stretching away on every side from every human being with whom you have no sympathy. Their humanity affects me as simply monstrous. Rocks—earth—brute beasts comparatively are not so strange to me. When I sit in the parlors or kitchens of some with whom my business brings me—I was going to say in contact—(business, like misery, makes strange bedfellows) I feel a sort of awe and as forlorn as if I were cat away on a desolate shore—I think of Riley’s Narrative & his sufferings. You who soared like a merlin with your mate through the realms of ether—in the presence of the unlike drop at once to earth a mere amorphous squab—divested of your air inflated pinions. (By the way, excuse this writing, for I am using the stub of the last feather I chance to possess.) You travel on, however, through this dark & desert world. You see in the distance an intelligent & sympathizing lineament,—stars come forth in the dark & oases appear in the desert.

  But (to return to the sobject of coats), we are well nigh smothered under yet more more fatal coats, which do not fit us, our whole lives long. Consider the cloak that our employment or station is. How rarely men treat each other for what in their true & naked characters they are. How we use & tolerate pretensions; how the judge is clothed with dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility that does not belong to him, and the criminal perchance with shame or impudence which no more belong to him It does not matter so much then what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks. Change the coat—put the judge in the criminal box & the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men

  No doubt the thinnest of all cloaks in conscious deception or lies it is sleazy & frays out, it is not close woven like cloth—but it meshes are a coarse net-work. A man can afford to lie only at the intersection of the threats, but truth puts in the filling & makes a consistent stuff.

  I mean merely to suggest how much the station affects the demeanor & self-respectability of the parties, & that the difference between the judge’s coat of cloth & the criminal’s is insignificant compared with—or only partially significant of—the difference between the coats which their respective station permits them to wear. What airs the judge may put on over his coat which the criminal may not! The judge’s opinion (sententia) of the criminal sentences him & is read by the clerk of the court, & published to the world, & executed by the sheriff—but the criminal’s opinion of the judge has the weight of a sentence & is published & executed only in the supreme court of the universe—a court not of common pleas. How much juster is the one than the other? Men are continually sentencing each other, but whether we be judges or criminals, the sentence is ineffectual unless we condemn ourselves.

  I am glad to hear that I do not always limit your vision when you look this way—that you sometimes see the light through me, that I am here & there windows & not all deadwall. Might not the community sometimes petition a man to remove himself as a nuisance—a darkener of the day—a too large mote?

  H.D.T