I know I have my
counterpart in some State of this Union. I feel sure that there is an
Englishman somewhere precisely like myself. (I hope he does not drop his
h's, for it does not seem to me possible that the Royal Dane could have
remained faithful to his love for Ophelia, if she had addressed him as
'Amlet.) There is also a certain Monsieur, to me at this moment unknown,
and likewise a Herr Von Something, each of whom is essentially my double.
An Arab is at this moment eating dates, a mandarin is just sipping his
tea, and a South-Sea-Islander (with undeveloped possibilities) drinking
the milk of a cocoa-nut, each one of whom, if he had been born in the
gambrel-roofed house, and cultivated my little sand-patch, and grown up
in "the study" from the height of Walton's Polyglot Bible to that of the
shelf which held the Elzevir Tacitus and Casaubon's Polybius, with all
the complex influences about him that surrounded me, would have been so
nearly what I am that I should have loved him like a brother,--always
provided that I did not hate him for his resemblance to me, on the same
principle as that which makes bodies in the same electric condition repel
each other.
For, perhaps after all, my One Reader is quite as likely to be not the
person most resembling myself, but the one to whom my nature is
complementary.
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