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. GIFT OF THE HEIRS OF
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F R H E N D S H I P
A N D L O V E
Two Essays by
RALPH WALDo EMERSoN
---
PAUL ELDER AND MoRGAN SHEPARD
S a n F r a n c is co
I 9 o 2

Friendship
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Friendship
WE have a great deal more kindness
than is ever spoken. Barring
all the selfishness that chills like east
winds the world, the whole human
family is bathed with an element of
love like a fine ether. How many
persons we meet in houses, whom we
scarcely speak to, whom yet we honour,
and who honour us ! How many we
see in the street, or sit with in church,
whom, though silently, we warmly re-
joice to be with ! Read the language
of these wandering eyebeams. The
heart knoweth.
# Friendship
The effect of the indulgence of this
human affection is a certain cordial
exhilaration. In poetry, and in com-
mon speech, the emotions of benevo-
lence and complacency which are felt
toward others are likened to the ma–
terial effects of fire; so swift, or much
more swift, more active, more cheer-
ing are these fine inward irradiations.
From the highest degree of passionate
love, to the lowest degree of good-will,
they make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers in-
crease with our affection. The scholar
sits down to write, and all his years of
meditation do not furnish him with one
good thought or happy expression ; but
it is necessary to write a letter to a
friend, and, forthwith, troops of gentle
thoughts invest themselves, on every
2
Friendship #
hand, with chosen words. See in any
house, where virtue and self-respect
abide, the palpitation which the ap-
proach of a stranger causes. A com-
mended stranger is expected and an-
nounced, and an uneasiness between
pleasure and pain invades all the hearts
of a household. His arrival almost
brings fear to the good hearts that would
welcome him. The house is dusted, all
things fly into their places, the old coat
is exchanged for the new, and they must
get up a dinner if they can. Of a com-
mended stranger, only the good report
is told by others, only the good and
new is heard by us. He stands to us
for humanity. He is, what we wish.
Having imagined and invested him,
we ask how we should stand re-
lated in conversation and action with
3
* Friendship
such a man, and are uneasy with fear.
The same idea exalts conversation with
him. We talk better than we are wont.
We have the nimblest fancy, a richer
memory, and our dumb devil has taken
leave for the time. For long hours we
can continue a series of sincere, grace-
ful, rich communications, drawn from
the oldest, secretest experience, so that
they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk
and acquaintance, shall feel a lively
surprise at our unusual powers. But
as soon as the stranger begins to in-
trude his partialities, his definitions,
his defects, into the conversation, it is
all over. He has heard the first, the
last and best, he will ever hear from us.
He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, igno-
rance, misapprehension, are old acquaint-
ances. Now, when he comes, he may
4
Friendship #
get the order, the dress, and the dinner,
but the throbbing of the heart, and the
communications of the soul, no more.
Pleasant are these jets of affection
which resume a young world for me
again. Delicious is a just and firm
encounter of two, in a thought, in a
feeling. How beautiful, on their ap-
proach to this beating heart, the steps
and forms of the gifted and the true !
The moment we indulge our affections
the earth is metamorphosed: there is
no winter, and no night: all tragedies,
all ennuis vanish ; all duties even ; noth-
ing fills the proceeding eternity but the
forms all radiant of beloved persons.
Let the soul be assured that somewhere
in the universe it should rejoin its friend,
and it would be content and cheerful
alone for a thousand years.
5
# Friendship
I awoke this morning with devout
thanksgiving for my friends, the old
and the new. Shall I not call God,
the Beautiful, who daily showeth him-
self so to me in his gifts I chide
society, I embrace solitude, and yet I
am not so ungrateful as not to see the
wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded,
as from time to time they pass my gate.
Who hears me, who understands me,
becomes mine — a possession for all
time. Nor is nature so poor, but she
gives me this joy several times, and
thus we weave social threads of our
own, a new web of relations; and, as
many thoughts in succession substan-
tiate themselves, we shall by and by
stand in a new world of our own
creation, and no longer strangers and
pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My
6
Friendship #
friends have come to me unsought.
The great God gave them to me. By
oldest right, by the divine affinity of
virtue with itself, I find them, or rather,
not I, but the Deity in me and in them,
both deride and cancel the thick walls
of individual character, relation, age,
sex, and circumstance, at which he
usually connives, and now makes many
one. High thanks I owe you, ex-
cellent lovers, who carry out the world
for me to new and noble depths, and
enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts.
These are not stark and stiffened per-
sons, but the newborn poetry of God —
poetry without stop — hymn, ode and
poetry still flowing, and not yet caked
in dead books with annotation and
grammar, but Apollo and the Muses
chanting still. Will these two sepa-
* -
7
# Friendship
rate themselves from me again, or
some of them I know not, but I
fear it not; for my relation to them
is so pure, that we hold by simple
affinity, and the Genius of my life
being thus social, the same affinity will
exert its energy on whomsoever is as
noble as these men and women, where-
ever I may be.
I confess to an extreme tenderness
of nature on this point. It is almost
dangerous to me to “crush the sweet
poison of misused wine ‘’ of the affec-
tions. A new person is to me always
a great event, and hinders me from
sleep. I have had such fine fancies
lately about two or three persons,
as have given me delicious hours; but
the joy ends in the day: it yields no
fruit. Thought is not born of it; my
8
Friendship #
action is very little modified. I must
feel pride in my friend’s accomplish-
ments as if they were mine — wild,
delicate, throbbing property in his
virtues. I feel as warmly when he
is praised as the lover when he hears
applause of his engaged maiden. We
overestimate the conscience of our
friend. His goodness seems better
than our goodness, his nature finer,
his temptations less. Everything that
is his, his name, his form, his dress,
books, and instruments, fancy enhances.
Our own thought sounds new and
larger from his mouth.
Yet the systole and diastole of the
heart are not without their analogy in
the ebb and flow of love. Friendship,
like the immortality of the soul, is too
good to be believed. The lover, be-
9 -
+: Friendship
holding his maiden, half knows that
she is not verily that which he wor-
ships, and in the golden hour of
friendship, we are surprised with shades
of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt
that we bestow on our hero the vir–
tues in which he shines, and afterward
worship the form to which we have
ascribed this divine inhabitation. In
strictness, the soul does not respect
men as it respects itself. In strict
science, all persons underlie the same
condition of an infinite remoteness.
Shall we fear to cool our love by fac-
ing the fact, by mining for the meta-
physical foundation of this Elysian
temple Shall I not be as real as the
things I see 2 If I am, I shall not fear
to know them for what they are.
Their essence is not less beautiful than
IO
Friendship #
their appearance, though it needs finer
organs for its apprehension. The root
of the plant is not unsightly to science,
though for chaplets and festoons we
cut the stem short. And I must
hazard the production of the bald fact
amid these pleasing reveries, though
it should prove an Egyptian skull at
our banquet. A man who stands
united with his thought, conceives
magnificently to himself. He is con-
scious of a universal success, even
though bought by uniform particular
failures. No advantages, no powers,
no gold or force can be any match
for him. I cannot choose but rely on
my own poverty, more than on your
wealth. I cannot make your con-
sciousness tantamount to mine. Only
the star dazzles; the planet has a faint,
I I
# Friendship
moon-like ray. I hear what you say of
the admirable parts and tried temper
of the party you praise, but I see well
that for all his purple cloaks I shall not
like him, unless he is at last a poor
Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O
friend, that the vast shadow of the
phenomenal includes thee, also, in its
pied and painted immensity — thee,
also, compared with whom all else is
shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth
is, as Justice is — thou art not my soul,
but a picture and effigy of that. Thou
hast come to me lately, and already
thou art seizing thy hat and cloak.
Is it not that the soul puts forth friends,
as the tree puts forth leaves, and
presently by the germination of new
buds, extrudes the old leaf The law
of nature is alternation for evermore.
I 2
Friendship #
Each electrical state superinduces the
opposite. The soul environs itself
with friends, that it may enter into
a grander self-acquaintance or solitude;
and it goes alone, for a season, that it
may exalt its conversation or society.
This method betrays itself along the
whole history of our personal relations.
Ever the instinct of affection revives
the hope of union with our mates,
and ever the returning sense of in-
sulation recalls us from the chase.
Thus every man passes his life in
the search after friendship, and if he
should record his true sentiment, he
might write a letter like this, to each
new candidate for his love:
DEAR FRIEND:
If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capac-
ity; sure to match my mood with thine, I
I 3
# Friendship
should never think again of trifles, in relation
to thy comings and goings. I am not very
wise : my moods are quite attainable :
and I respect thy genius : it is to me as yet
unfathomed ; yet dare I not presume in thee
a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art
to me a delicious torment.
Thine ever, or never.
Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine
pains are for curiosity, and not for life.
They are not to be indulged. This is
to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our
friendships hurry to short and poor
conclusions, because we have made
them a texture of wine and dreams,
instead of the tough fibre of the human
heart. The laws of friendship are
great, austere, and eternal, of one web
with the laws of nature and of morals.
But we have aimed at a swift and petty
I4
Friendship #
benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness,
We snatch at the slowest fruit in the
whole garden of God, which many sum-
mers and many winters must ripen. We
seek our friend not sacredly but with
an adulterate passion which would
appropriate him to ourselves. In vain.
We are armed all over with subtle
antagonisms, which, as soon as we
meet, begin to play, and translate all
poetry into stale prose. Almost all
people descend to meet. All associ-
ation must be a compromise, and, what
is worst, the very flower and aroma of
the flower of each of the beautiful na–
tures disappears as they approach each
other. What a perpetual disappoint-
ment is actual society, even of the
virtuous and gifted After interviews
have been compassed with long fore-
I5
# Friendship
sight, we must be tormented presently
by baffled blows, by sudden, UIIl Se2SOIl-
able apathies, by epilepsies of wit and
of animal spirits, in the heyday of
friendship and thought. Our faculties
do not play us true, and both parties
are relieved by solitude.
I ought to be equal to every relation.
It makes no difference how many
friends I have, and what content I can
find in conversing with each, if there
be one to whom I am not equal.
If I have shrunk unequal from one
contest, instantly the joy I find in all
the rest becomes mean and cowardly.
I should hate myself, if then I made
my other friends my asylum.
“The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
I6
Friendship #
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”
Our impatience is thus sharply re-
buked. Bashfulness and apathy are a
tough husk in which a delicate organ-
isation is protected from premature
ripening. It would be lost if it knew
itself before any of the best souls were
yet ripe enough to know and own it.
Respect the naturlangsamkeit which
hardens the ruby in a million years,
and works in duration, in which Alps
and Andes come and go as rainbows.
The good spirit of our life has no
heaven which is the price of rashness.
Love, which is the essence of God, is
not for levity, but for the total worth
of man. Let us not have this childish
luxury in our regards; but the austerest
I7
# Friendship
worth; let us approach our friend with
an audacious trust in the truth of his
heart, in the breadth, impossible to be
overturned, of his foundations.
The attractions of this subject are
not to be resisted, and I leave, for the
time, all account of subordinate social
benefit, to speak of that select and
sacred relation which is a kind of
absolute, and which even leaves the
language of love suspicious and com-
mon, so much is this purer, and nothing
is so much divine.
I do not wish to treat friendships
daintily, but with roughest courage.
When they are real, they are not glass
threads or frost-work, but the solidest
thing we know. For now, after so
many ages of experience, what do we
know of nature, or of ourselves * Not
I8
Friendship #
one step has man taken toward the
solution of the problem of his destiny.
In one condemnation of folly stand
the whole universe of men. But the
sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which
I draw from this alliance with my
brother’s soul, is the nut itself whereof
all nature and all thought is but the
husk and shell. Happy is the house
that shelters a friend It might well
be built, like a festal bower or arch, to
entertain him a single day. Happier,
if he know the solemnity of that rela-
tion, and honour its law It is no idle
band, no holiday engagement. He who
offers himself a candidate for that cove—
nant comes up, like an Olympian, to
the great games, where the first-born
of the world are the competitors. He
proposes himself for contests where
I9
# Friendship
Time, Want, Danger are in the lists,
and he alone is victor who has truth
enough in his constitution to preserve
the delicacy of his beauty from the
wear and tear of all these. The gifts
of fortune may be present or absent,
but all the hap in that contest depends
on intrinsic nobleness, and the con-
tempt of trifles. There are two ele-
ments that go to the composition of
friendship, each so sovereign, that I
can detect no superiority in either, no
reason why either should be first named.
One is Truth. A friend is a person
with whom I may be sincere. Before
him, I may think aloud. I am arrived
at last in the presence of a man so real
and equal that I may drop even those
undermost garments of dissimulation,
courtesy, and second thought, which
2O
Friendship #
men never put off, and may deal with
him with the simplicity and wholeness,
with which one chemical atom meets
another. Sincerity is the luxury al-
lowed, like diadems and authority, only
to the highest rank, that being per-
mitted to speak truth, as having none
above it to court or conform unto.
Every man alone is sincere. At the
entrance of a second person, hypocrisy
begins. We parry and fend the ap-
proach of our fellow man by compli-
ments, by gossip, by amusements, by
affairs. We cover up our thought
from him under a hundred folds. I
knew a man who, under a certain re-
ligious frenzy, cast off this drapery,
and omitting all compliments and com-
monplace, spoke to the conscience of
every person he encountered, and that
2 I
# Friendship
with great insight and beauty. At first
he was resisted, and all men agreed he
was mad. But persisting, as indeed he
could not help doing, for some time in
this course, he attained to the advan—
tage of bringing every man of his
acquaintance into true relations with
him. No man would think of speak-
ing falsely with him, or of putting him
off with any chat of markets or read-
ing-rooms. But every man was con-
strained by so much sincerity to face
him, and what love of nature, what
poetry, what symbol of truth he had,
he did certainly show him. But to
most of us society shows not its face
and eye, but its side and its back. To
stand in true relations with men in a
false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is
it not We can seldom go erect.
22
Friendship #
Almost every man we meet requires
some civility, requires to be humoured
— he has some fame, some talent,
some whim of religion or philanthropy
in his head that is not to be questioned,
and so spoils all conversation with him.
But a friend is a sane man who ex-
ercises not my ingenuity but me. My
friend gives me entertainment without
requiring me to stoop, or to lisp, or to
mask myself. A friend, therefore, is a
sort of paradox in nature. I who alone
am, I who see nothing in nature whose
existence I can affirm with equal evi-
dence to my own, behold now the
semblance of my being in all its
height, variety, and curiosity, reiter-
ated in a foreign form ; so that a
friend may well be reckoned the
masterpiece of nature.
23
# Friendship
The other element of friendship is
Tenderness. We are holden to men
by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride,
by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by
hate, by admiration, by every circum-
stance and badge and trifle, but we
can scarce believe that so much char-
acter can subsist in another as to draw
us by love. Can another be so blessed,
and we so pure, that we can offer him
tenderness When a man becomes
dear to me, I have touched the goal of
fortune. I find very little written
directly to the heart of this matter
in books. And yet I have one text
which I cannot choose but remember.
My author says, “I offer myself faintly
and bluntly to those whose I effec-
tually am, and tender myself least to
him to whom I am the most devoted.”
24
Friendship #
I wish that friendship should have feet,
as well as eyes and eloquence. It must
plant itself on the ground, before it
walks over the moon. I wish it to
be a little of a citizen, before it is
quite a cherub. We chide the citizen
because he makes love a commodity.
It is an exchange of gifts, of useful
loans; it is good neighbourhood; it
watches with the sick; it holds the
pall at the funeral ; and quite loses
sight of the delicacies and nobility of
the relation. But though we cannot º
find the god under this disguise of a
sutler, yet, on the other hand, we can-
not forgive the poet if he spins his
thread too fine, and does not substan-
tiate his romance by the municipal
virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity,
and pity. I hate the prostitution of the
25
# Friendship
name of friendship to signify modish
and worldly alliances. I much prefer
the company of ploughboys and tin-
peddlers, to the silken and perfumed
amity which only celebrates its days
of encounter by a frivolous display, by
rides in a curricle, and dinners at the
best taverns. The end of friendship
is a commerce the most strict and
homely that can be joined ; more strict
than any of which we have experience.
It is for aid and comfort through all
the relations and passages of life and
death. It is fit for serene days, and
graceful gifts, and country rambles,
but also for rough roads and hard fare,
shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.
It keeps company with the sallies of
the wit and the trances of religion.
We are to dignify to each other the
26
Friendship #
º-
daily needs and offices of man’s life,
and embellish it by courage, wisdom,
and unity. It should never fall into
something usual and settled, but should
be alert and inventive, and add rhyme
and reason to what was drudgery.
For perfect friendship it may be said
to require natures so rare and costly,
so well tempered each, and so happily
adapted, and withal so circumstanced
(for even in that particular, a poet
says, love demands that the parties
be altogether paired), that very seldom
can its satisfaction be realised. It
cannot subsist in its perfection, say
some of those who are learned in this
warm lore of the heart, betwixt more
than two. I am not quite so strict
in my terms, perhaps because I have
never known so high a fellowship as
27 &
# F riendship
others. I please my imagination more
with a circle of godlike men and women
variously related to each other, —
and between whom subsists a lofty in-
telligence. But I find this law of
one to one, peremptory for conversation,
which is the practice and consumma-
tion of friendship. Do not mix waters
too much. The best mix as ill as
good and bad. You shall have very
useful and cheering discourse at several
times with two several men, but let
all three of you come together, and
you shall not have one new and hearty
word. Two may talk and one may
hear, but three cannot take part in
a conversation of the most sincere
and searching sort. In good company
there is never such discourse between
two, across the table, as takes place
* * 28
F riendship #:
when you leave them alone. In good
company, the individuals at once merge
their egotism into a social soul exactly
coextensive with the several con-
sciousnesses there present. No par-
tialities of friend to friend, no fond-
nesses of brother to sister, of wife to
husband, are there pertinent, but quite
otherwise. Only he may then speak
who can sail on the common thought
of the party, and not poorly limited to
his own. Now this convention, which
good sense demands, destroys the high
freedom of great conversation, which
requires an absolute running of two
souls into one.
No two men but being left alone with
each other, enter into simpler relations.
Yet it is affinity that determines which
two shall converse. Unrelated men
29
# Friendship
give little joy to each other; will
never suspect the latent powers of
each. We talk sometimes of a great
talent for conversation, as if it were
a permanent property in some individ-
uals. Conversation is an evanescent
relation — no more. A man is reputed
to have thought and eloquence ; he can-
not, for all that, say a word to his
cousin or his uncle. They accuse his
silence with as much reason as they
would blame the insignificance of a
dial in the shade. In the sun it will
mark the hour. Among those who
enjoy his thought, he will regain his
tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean
betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that
piques each with the presence of power
and of consent in the other party. Let
3O
Friendship #
me alone to the end of the world, rather
than that my friend should over-step
by a word or a look his real sympathy.
I am equally balked by antagonism
and by compliance. Let him not
cease an instant to be himself. The only
joy I have in his being mine, is that
the not mine is mine. It turns the
stomach, it blots the daylight; where
I looked for a manly furtherance, or at
least a manly resistance, to find a mush
of concession. Better be a nettle in
the side of your friend, than his echo.
The condition which high friendship
demands is ability to do without it.
To be capable of that high office re-
quires great and sublime parts. There
must be very two before there can be
very one. Let it be an alliance of two
large formidable natures, mutually be-
3I
# Friendship
held, mutually feared, before yet they
recognise the deep identity which be-
neath these disparities unites them.
He only is fit for this society who
is magnanimous. He must be so, to
know its law. He must be one who
is sure that greatness and goodness are
always economy. He must be one
who is not swift to intermeddle with
his fortunes. Let him not dare to
intermeddle with this. Leave to the
diamond its ages to grow, nor expect
to accelerate the births of the eternal.
Friendship demands a religious treat-
ment. We must not be wilful, we
must not provide. We talk of choos-
ing our friends, but friends are self-
elected. Reverence is a great part of
it. Treat your friend as a spectacle.
Of course, if he be a man, he has
* 2
J-
Friendship #
merits that are not yours, and that you
cannot honour, if you must needs hold
him close to your person. Stand aside.
Give those merits room. Let them
mount and expand. Be not so much
his friend that you can never know his
peculiar energies, like fond mammas
who shut up their boy in the house
until he is almost grown a girl. Are
you the friend of your friend’s buttons,
or of his thought To a great heart
he will still be a stranger in a thousand
particulars, that he may come near
in the holiest ground. Leave it to
girls and boys to regard a friend as
property, and to suck a short and all-
confounding pleasure instead of the pure
nectar of God.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild
by a long probation. Why should we
33
# Friendship
desecrate noble and beautiful souls by
intruding on them : Why insist on
rash personal relations with your
friend ? Why go to his house, or
know his mother and brother and
sisters ? Why be visited by him at
your own : Are these things material
to our covenant Leave this touch-
ing and clawing. Let him be to me a
spirit. A message, a thought, a sin-
cerity, a glance from him I want, but
not news, nor pottage. I can get poli-
tics, and chat, and neighbourly con-
veniences, from cheaper companions.
Should not the society of my friend be
to me poetic, pure, universal, and great
as nature itself? Ought I to feel that
our tie is profane in comparison with
yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the
horizon, or that clump of waving grass
34
Friendship #
that divides the brook Let us not
vilify but raise it to that standard. That
great defying eye, that scornful beauty
of his mien and action, do not pique
yourself on reducing, but rather fortify
and enhance. Worship his superiori-
ties. Wish him not less by a thought,
but hoard and tell them all. Guard
him as thy great counterpart; have a
princedom to thy friend. Let him be
to thee for ever a sort of beautiful
enemy, untamable, devoutly revered,
and not a trivial conveniency to be
soon outgrown and cast aside. The
hues of the opal, the light of the
diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye
is too near. To my friend I write a
letter, and from him I receive a letter.
That seems to you a little. Me it
suffices. It is a spiritual gift worthy
35
# Friendship
of him to give and of me to receive.
It profanes nobody. In these warm
lines the heart will trust itself, as it
will not to the tongue, and pour out the
prophecy of a godlier existence than all
the annals of heroism have yet made
good.
Respect so far the holy laws of this
fellowship as not to prejudice its per-
fect flower by your impatience for its
opening. We must be our own before
we can be another’s. There is at least
this satisfaction in crime, according
to the Latin proverb: you can speak
to your accomplice on even terms.
Crimen quos inquinat, aequat. To
those whom we admire and love, at
first we cannot. Yet the least defect
of self-possession vitiates, in my judg-
ment, the entire relation. There can
36
Friendship #
never be deep peace between two
spirits, never mutual respect until, in
their dialogue, each stands for the
whole world.
What is so great as friendship, let
us carry with what grandeur of spirit
we can. Let us be silent — so we
may hear the whisper of the gods.
Let us not interfere. Who set you
to cast about what you should say to
the select souls, or to say anything
to such No matter how ingenious,
no matter how graceful and bland.
There are innumerable degrees of folly
and wisdom, and for you to say aught
is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy soul
shall speak. Wait until the necessary
and everlasting overpowers you, until
day and night avail themselves of your
lips. The only money of God is God.
37
# Friendship
He pays never with anything less or
anything else. The only reward of
virtue, is virtue: the only way to have
a friend, is to be one. Vain to hope
to come nearer a man by getting into
his house. If unlike, his soul only flees
faster from you, and you shall catch
never a true glance of his eye. We
see the noble afar off, and they repel
us; why should we intrude : Late —
very late — we perceive that no ar-
rangements, no introductions, no con-
suetudes, or habits of society, would be
of any avail to establish us in such re-
lations with them as we desire — but
solely the uprise of nature in us to the
same degree it is in them : then shall
we meet as water with water : and if
we should not meet them then, we
shall not want them, for we are already
38
Friendship #
they. In the last analysis, love is only
the reflection of a man’s own worthi-
ness from other men. Men have
sometimes exchanged names with their
friends, as if they would signify that in
their friend each loved his own soul.
The higher the style we demand of
friendship, of course the less easy to
establish it with flesh and blood. We
walk alone in the world. Friends,
such as we desire, are dreams and
fables. But a sublime hope cheers
ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere,
in other regions of the universal power,
souls are now acting, enduring, and
daring, which can love us, and which
we can love. We may congratu-
late ourselves that the period of
nonage, of follies, of blunders, and
of shame, is passed in solitude, and
39
# F riendship
when we are finished men, we shall
grasp heroic hands in heroic hands.
Only be admonished by what you
already see, not to strike leagues of
friendship with cheap persons, where
no friendship can be. Our impatience
betrays us into rash and foolish alliances
which no God attends. By persisting
in your path, though you forfeit the
little, you gain the great. You become
pronounced. You demonstrate yourself
so as to put yourself out of the reach
of false relations, and you draw to you
the first-born of the world, those rare
pilgrims whereof only one or two
wander in nature at once, and before
whom the vulgar great, show as spec-
tres and shadows merely.
It is foolish to be afraid of making
our ties too spiritual, as if so we could
4O
Friendship #
lose any genuine love. Whatever cor-
rection of our popular views we make
from insight, nature will be sure to
bear us out in, and though it seem to
rob us of some joy, will repay us with
a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the
absolute insulation of man. We are
sure that we have all in us. We go
to Europe, or we pursue persons, or
we read books, in the instinctive faith
that these will call it out and reveal us
to ourselves. Beggars all. The per-
sons are such as we ; the Europe, an
old faded garment of dead persons; the
books, their ghosts. Let us drop this
idolatry. Let us give over this mendi-
cancy. Let us even bid our dearest
friends farewell, and defy them, saying,
“Who are you ? Unhand me. I will
be dependent no more.” Ah seest
4 I
# F riendship
thou not, O brother, that thus we part
only to meet again on a higher platform,
and only be more each other's, because
we are more our own A friend is
Janus-faced ; he looks to the past and
the future. He is the child of all my
foregoing hours, the prophet of those
to come. He is the harbinger of a
greater friend. It is the property of
the divine to be reproductive.
I do then with my friends as I do
with my books. I would have them
where I can find them, but I seldom use
them. We must have society on our
own terms, and admit or exclude it on
the slightest cause. I cannot afford to
speak much with my friend. If he is
great, he makes me so great that I can-
not descend to converse. In the great
days, presentiments hover before me, far
42
Friendship #
before me in the firmament. I ought
then to dedicate myself to them. I go in
that I may seize them; I go out that I
may seize them. I fear only that I may
lose them receding into the sky in
which now they are only a patch of
brighter light. Then, though I prize
my friends, I cannot afford to talk with
them and study their visions, lest I lose
my own. It would indeed give me a
certain household joy to quit this lofty
seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or
search of stars, and come down to
warm sympathies with you ; but then
I know well I shall mourn always the
vanishing of my mighty gods. It is
true, next week I shall have languid
times, when I can well afford to
occupy myself with foreign objects;
then I shall regret the lost literature
43
# Friendship
of your mind, and wish you were by my
side again. But if you come, perhaps
you will fill my mind only with new
visions, not with yourself but with
your lustres, and I shall not be able
any more than now to converse with
you. So I will owe to my friends this
evanescent intercourse. I will re-
ceive from them not what they have,
but what they are. They shall
give me that which properly they can-
not give me, but which radiates from
them. But they shall not hold me by
any relations less subtle and pure. We
will meet as though we met not, and
part as though we parted not.
It has seemed to me lately more
possible than I knew, to carry a friend-
ship greatly, on one side, without due
correspondence on the other. Why
44
Friendship #
should I cumber myself with the poor
fact that the receiver is not capacious
It never troubles the sun that some of
his rays fall wide and vain into un-
grateful space, and only a small part
on the reflecting planet. Let your
greatness educate the crude and cold
companion. If he is unequal, he will
presently pass away, but thou art en-
larged by thy own shining; and, no
longer a mate for frogs and worms,
dost soar and burn with the gods of
the empyrean. It is thought a dis-
grace to love unrequited. But the
great will see that true love cannot
be unrequited. True love transcends
instantly the unworthy object, and
dwells and broods on the eternal,
and when the poor, interposed mask
crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid
45
* Friendship
of so much earth, and feels its inde-
pendency the surer. Yet these things
may hardly be said without a sort of
treachery to the relation. The essence
of friendship is entireness, a total mag-
nanimity and trust. It must not sur-
mise or provide for infirmity. It treats
its object as a god, that it may deify
both.
46.
Love
Love
VERY soul is a celestial Venus to
every other soul. The heart has
its sabbaths and jubilees, in which the
world appears as a hymeneal feast,
and all natural sounds and the circle
of the seasons are erotic odes and
dances. Love is omnipresent in nature
as motive and reward. Love is our
highest word, and the synonym of
God. Every promise of the soul has
innumerable fulfilments: each of its
joys ripens into a new want. Nature,
uncontainable, flowing, fore-looking, in
the first sentiment of kindness antici-
49
# Love
pates already a benevolence which shall
lose all particular regards in its general
light. The introduction to this felicity
is in a private and tender relation of
one to one, which is the enchantment
of human life; which, like a certain
divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on
man at one period, and works a revolu-
tion in his mind and body; unites him
to his race, pledges him to the domestic
and civic relations, carries him with
new sympathy into nature, enhances
the power of the senses, opens the
imagination, adds to his character
heroic and sacred attributes, estab-
lishes marriage, and gives permanence
to human society. -
The natural association of the senti-
ment of love with the heyday of the
blood, seems to require that in order to
5o
Love #
portray it in vivid tints which every
youth and maid should confess to be
true to their throbbing experience, one
must not be too old. The delicious
fancies of youth reject the least savour
of a mature philosophy, as chilling with
age and pedantry their purple bloom.
And, therefore, I know I incur the im-
putation of unnecessary hardness and
stoicism from those who compose the
Court and Parliament of Love. But
from these formidable censors I shall
appeal to my seniors. For it is to be
considered that this passion of which
we speak, though it begin with the
young, yet forsakes not the old, or
rather suffers no one who is truly its
servant to grow old, but makes the
aged participators of it, not less than
the tender maiden, though in a dif-
5 I
# Love
ferent and nobler sort. For, it is a
fire that kindling its first embers in the
narrow nook of a private bosom,
caught from a wandering spark out
of another private heart, glows and
enlarges until it warms and beams
upon multitudes of men and women,
upon the universal heart of all, and
so lights up the whole world and all
nature with its generous flames. It
matters not, therefore, whether we at-
tempt to describe the passion at twenty,
at thirty, or at eighty years. He who
paints it at the first period, will lose
some of its later ; he who paints it at
the last, some of its earlier traits. Only
it is to be hoped that by patience and
the muses’ aid, we may attain to that
inward view of the law, which shall
describe a truth ever young, ever beau-
52
Love #
tiful, so central that it shall commend
itself to the eye at whatever angle be-
holden.
And the first condition is, that we
must leave a too close and lingering
adherence to the actual, to facts, and
study the sentiment as it appeared in
hope and not in history. For each
man sees his own life defaced and dis-
figured, as the life of man is not, to his
imagination. Each man sees over his
own experience a certain slime of error,
while that of other men looks fair and
ideal. Let any man go back to those
delicious relations which make the
beauty of his life, which have given
him sincerest instruction and nourish-
ment, he will shrink and shrink. Alas !
I know not why, but infinite compunc-
tions embitter in mature life all the
53
# Love
remembrances of budding sentiment,
and cover every beloved name. Every-
thing is beautiful seen from the point
of the intellect, or as truth. But all is
sour, if seen as experience. Details
are always melancholy; the plan is
seemly and noble. It is strange how
painful is the actual world — the pain-
ful kingdom of time and place. There
dwells care and canker and fear. With
thought, with the ideal, is immortal
hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all
the muses sing. But with names and
persons and the partial interests of to-
day and yesterday, is grief.
The strong bent of nature is seen
in the proportion which this topic of
personal relations usurps in the con-
versation of society. What do we wish
to know of any worthy person so much
54
Love #
as how he has sped in the history of
this sentiment What books in the
circulating libraries circulate : How
we glow over these novels of passion,
when the story is told with any spark
of truth and nature | And what fastens
attention, in the intercourse of life,
like any passage betraying affection
between two parties Perhaps we
never saw them before, and never
shall meet them again. But we see
them exchange a glance, or betray a
deep emotion, and we are no longer
strangers. We understand them, and
take the warmest interest in the de-
velopment of the romance. * All man-
kind love a lover. The earliest demon-
strations of complacency and kindness
are nature’s most winning pictures. It
is the dawn of civility and grace in the
55
# Love
coarse and rustic. The rude village
boy teases the girls about the school-
house door; but to-day he comes run-
ning into the entry, and meets one fair
child arranging her satchel : he holds
her books to help her, and instantly it
seems to him as if she removed herself
from him infinitely, and was a sacred
precinct. Among the throng of girls
he runs rudely enough, but one alone
distances him : and these two little
neighbours that were so close just now,
have learned to respect each other’s
personality. Or who can avert his
eyes from the engaging, half-artful,
half-artless ways of schoolgirls who
go into the country shops to buy a
skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and
talk half an hour about nothing, with
the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy:
56
Love #
In the village, they are on a perfect
equality, which love delights in, and
without any coquetry the happy, af-
fectionate nature of woman flows out
in this pretty gossip. The girls may
have little beauty, yet plainly do they
establish between them and the good
boy the most agreeable, confiding re-
lations, what with their fun and their
earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and
Almira, and who was invited to the
party, and who danced at the dancing-
school, and when the singing-school
would begin, and other nothings con-
cerning which the parties cooed. By
and by that boy wants a wife, and very
truly and heartily will he know where
to find a sincere and sweet mate, with-
out any risk such as Milton deplores
as incident to scholars and great men.
57
# Love
I have been told that my philosophy
is unsocial, and, that in public dis-
courses, my reverence for the intellect
makes me unjustly cold to the personal
relations. But now I almost shrink
at the remembrance of such disparag-
ing words. For persons are love's
world, and the coldest philosopher
cannot recount the debt of the young
soul wandering here in nature to the
power of love, without being tempted
to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught
derogatory to the social instincts. For,
though the celestial rapture falling out
of heaven seizes only upon those of
tender age, and although a beauty over-
powering all analysis or comparison,
and putting us quite beside ourselves,
we can seldom see after thirty years,
yet the remembrance of these visions
58
Love #
outlasts all other remembrances, and
is a wreath of flowers on the oldest
brows. But here is a strange fact; it
may seem to many men in revising
their experience, that they have no
fairer page in their life’s book than
the delicious memory of some passages
wherein affection contrived to give a
witchcraft surpassing the deep attrac-
tion of its own truth to a parcel of
accidental and trivial circumstances.
In looking backward, they may find
that several things which were not
the charm, have more reality to this
groping memory than the charm itself
which embalmed them. But be our
experience in particulars what it may,
no man ever forgot the visitations of
that power to his heart and brain,
which created all things new ; which
59
# Love
was the dawn in him of music, poetry,
and art ; which made the face of nature
radiant with purple light; the morning
and the night varied enchantments;
when a single tone of one voice could
make the heart beat, and the most
trivial circumstance, associated with
one form, is put in the amber of
memory; when we became all eye
when one was present, and all memory
when one was gone; when the youth
becomes a watcher of windows, and
studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon,
or the wheels of a carriage; when no
place is too solitary, and none too
silent for him who has richer com—
pany and sweeter conversation in his
new thoughts, than any old friends,
though best and purest, can give him ;
for, the figures, the motions, the words
6o
Love #
of the beloved object are not like other
images written in water, but, as Plu-
tarch said, “enamelled in fire,” and
make the study of midnight.
“Thou are not gone being gone, where e'er
thou art,
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in
him thy loving heart.”
In the noon and the afternoon of
life, we still throb at the recollection
of days when happiness was not happy
enough, but must be drugged with the
relish of pain and fear; for he touched
the secret of the matter, who said of
love,
“All other pleasures are not worth its pains: ”
and when the day was not long enough,
but the night too must be consumed
in keen recollections; when the head
61
# Love
boiled all night on the pillow with
the generous deed it resolved on ;
when the moonlight was a pleasing
fever, and the stars were letters, and
the flowers ciphers, and the air was
coined into song; when all business
seemed an impertinence, and all the
men and women running to and fro
in the streets, mere pictures.
The passion remakes the world for
the youth. It makes all things alive
and significant. Nature grows con-
scious. Every bird on the boughs of
the tree sings now to his heart and
soul. Almost the notes are articulate.
The clouds have faces, as he looks on
them. The trees of the forest, the
waving grass, and the peeping flowers
have grown intelligent; and almost he
fears to trust them with the secret
62
Love #
which they seem to invite. Yet nature
soothes and sympathises. In the green
solitude he finds a dearer home than
with men.
“Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
A midnight bell, a passing groan,
These are the sounds we feed upon.”
Behold there in the wood the fine
madman He is a palace of sweet
sounds and sights; he dilates; he is
twice a man; he walks with arms
akimbo; he soliloquises; he accosts
the grass and the trees; he feels the
blood of the violet, the clover and the
lily in his veins; and he talks with
the brook that wets his foot.
63
# Love
The causes that have sharpened his
perceptions of natural beauty have
made him love music and verse. It is
a fact often observed, that men have
written good verses under the inspira-
tion of passion, who cannot write well
under any other circumstances.
The like force has the passion over
all his nature. It expands the senti-
ment; it makes the clown gentle, and
gives the coward heart. Into the most
pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart
and courage to defy the world, so only
it have the countenance of the beloved
object. In giving him to another, it
still more gives him to himself. He is
a new man, with new perceptions, new
and keener purposes, and a religious
solemnity of character and aims. He
does not longer appertain to his family
64
Love #
and society. He is somewhat. He is
a person. He is a soul.
And here let us examine a little
nearer the nature of that influence
which is thus potent over the human
youth. Let us approach and admire
Beauty, whose revelation to man we
now celebrate, – beauty, welcome as
the sun wherever it pleases to shine,
which pleases everybody with it and
with themselves. Wonderful is its
charm. It seems sufficient to itself.
The lover cannot paint his maiden to
his fancy poor and solitary. Like a
tree in flower, so much soft, budding,
informing loveliness is society for
itself, and she teaches his eye why
Beauty was ever painted with Loves
and Graces attending her steps. Her
existence makes the world rich.
65
# Love
Though she extrudes all other per-
sons from his attention as cheap and
unworthy, yet she indemnifies him by
carrying out her own being into some-
what impersonal, large, mundane, so
that the maiden stands to him for a
representative of all select things and
t
virtues.; For that reason the lover sees
never personal resemblances in his mis-
tress to her kindred or to others. His
friends find in her a likeness to her
mother, or her sisters, or to persons
not of her blood. The lover sees no
resemblance except to summer even-
ings and diamond mornings, to rain-
bows and the song of birds.
Beauty is ever that divine thing the
ancients esteemed it. It is, they said,
the flowering of virtue. Who can
analyse the nameless charm which
66
Love #
glances from one and another face
and form * We are touched with
emotions of tenderness and compla–
cency, but we cannot find whereat this
dainty emotion, this wandering gleam
points. It is destroyed for the imag-
ination by any attempt to refer it to
organisation. Nor does it point to
any relations of friendship or love that
society knows and has, but, as it seems
to me, to a quite other and unattainable
sphere, to relations of transcendent
delicacy and sweetness, a true fairy-
land; to what roses and violets hint
and foreshow. We cannot get at
beauty. Its nature is like opaline
doves’-neck lustres, hovering and ev-
anescent. Herein it resembles the
most excellent things, which all have
this rainbow character, defying all at-
67
* Love
tempts at appropriation and use. What
else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when
he said to music, “Away away I thou
speakest to me of things which in all
my endless life I have found not, and
shall not find.” The same fact may
be observed in every work of the plas-
tic arts. The statue is then beautiful,
when it begins to be incomprehensible,
when it is passing out of criticism, and
can no longer be defined by compass
and measuring wand, but demands an
active imagination to go with it, and
to say what it is in the act of doing.
The God or hero of the sculptor is
always represented in a transition from
that which is representable to the
senses, to that which is not. Then
first it ceases to be a stone. The
same remark holds of painting. And
68
Love #
of poetry, the success is not attained
when it lulls and satisfies, but when it
astonishes and fires us with new en-
deavours after the unattainable. Con-
cerning it, Landor inquires “whether
it is not to be referred to some purer
state of sensation and existence.”
So must it be with personal beauty,
which love worships. Then first is it
charming and itself, when it dissatisfies
us with any end; when it becomes a
story without an end ; when it suggests
gleams and visions, and not earthly
satisfactions; when it seems
“Too bright and good,
For human nature’s daily food; ”
when it makes the beholder feel his
unworthiness, when he cannot feel his
right to it, though he were Caesar;
69
# Love
he cannot feel more right to it, than
to the firmament and the splendours
of a sunset.
Hence arose the saying: “ If I love
you, what is that to you ?” We say
so, because we feel that what we love,
is not in your will, but above it. It is
the radiance of you and not you. It
is that which you know not in your-
self, and can never know.
This agrees well with that high phi-
losophy of Beauty which the ancient
writers delighted in ; for they said, that
the soul of man, embodied here on
earth, went roaming up and down in
quest of that other world of its own,
out of which it came into this, but was
soon stupefied by the light of the nat-
ural sun, and unable to see any other
objects than those of this world, which
7o
Love #
are but shadows of real things. There-
fore, the Deity sends the glory of youth
before the soul, that it may avail itself
of beautiful bodies as aids to its recol-
lection of the celestial good and fair;
and the man, beholding such a person
in the female sex, runs to her, and finds
the highest joy in contemplating the
form, movement, and intelligence of
this person, because it suggests to him
the presence of that which indeed is
within the beauty, and the cause of the
beauty. -
If, however, from too much convers-
ing with material objects, the soul was
gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in
the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow ;
body being unable to fulfil the promise
which beauty holds out; but if, accept-
ing the hint of these visions and sugges-
7I
# Love
tions which beauty makes to his mind,
the soul passes through the body, and
fails to admire strokes of character, and
the lovers contemplate one another in
their discourses and their actions, then
they pass to the true palace of Beauty,
more and more inflame their love of
it, and by this love extinguishing the
base affection, as the sun puts out the
fire by shining on the hearth, they be-
come pure and hallowed. By conver-
sation with that which is in itself ex-
cellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just,
the lover comes to a warmer love of
these nobilities, and a quicker appre-
hension of them. Then, he passes
from loving them in one, to lov-
ing them in all, and so is the one
beautiful soul only the door through
which he enters to the society of all
72
Love #
true and pure souls. In the particular
society of his mate, he attains a clearer
sight of any spot, any taint, which her
beauty has contracted from this world,
and is able to point it out, and this with
mutual joy that they are now able with-
out offense to indicate blemishes and
hinderances in each other, and give to
each all help and comfort in curing the
same. And, beholding in many souls
the traits of the divine beauty, and
separating in each soul that which is
divine from the taint which they have
contracted in the world, the lover
ascends ever to the highest beauty, to
the love and knowledge of the Divinity,
by steps on this ladder of created souls.
Somewhat like this have the truly
wise told us of love in all ages. The
doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If
* 73
# Love
Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius taught it,
so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton.
It awaits a truer unfolding in opposi-
tion and rebuke to that subterranean
prudence which presides at marriages
with words that take hold of the upper
world, while one eye is eternally boring
down into the cellar, so that its gravest
discourse has ever a slight savour of
hams and powdering-tubs. Worst,
when the snout of this sensualism in-
trudes into the education of young
women, and withers the hope and
affection of human nature, by teach-
ing that marriage signifies nothing but
a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s
life has no other aim. -
But this dream of love, though
beautiful, is only one scene in our
play. In the procession of the soul
74
Love #
from within outward, it enlarges its
circles ever, like the pebble thrown
into the pond, or the light proceeding
from an orb. The rays of the soul
alight first on things nearest, on every
utensil and toy, on nurses and domes–
tics, on the house and yard and pas-
sengers, on the circle of household ac-
quaintance, on politics, and geography,
and history. But by the necessity of
our constitution, things are ever group-
ing themselves according to higher or
more interior laws. Neighbourhood,
size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by
degrees their power over us. Cause
and effect, real affinities, the longing
for harmony between the soul and the
circumstance, the high progressive
idealising instinct, these predominate
later, and ever the step backward from
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# Love
the higher to the lower relations is im-
possible. Thus even love, which is
the deification of persons, must be-
come more impersonal every day. Of
this at first it gives no hint. Little
think the youth and maiden who are
glancing at each other across crowded
rooms, with eyes so full of mutual in-
telligence, — of the precious fruit long
hereafter to proceed from this new
quite external stimulus. The work
of vegetation begins first in the irri-
tability of the bark and leaf-buds.
From exchanging glances, they ad-
vance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry,
then to fiery passion, to plighting troth
and marriage. Passion beholds its ob-
ject as a perfect unit. The soul is
wholly embodied, and the body is
wholly ensouled.
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Love #
“Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought.”
Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into
little stars to make the heavens fine.
Life, with this pair, has no other aim,
asks no more than Juliet — than
Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents,
kingdoms, religion, are all contained
in this form full of soul, in this soul
which is all form. The lovers delight
in endearments, in avowals of love, in
comparisons of their regards. When
alone, they solace themselves with the
remembered image of the other. Does
that other see the same star, the same
melting cloud, read the same book,
feel the same emotion that now de-
light me 2 They try and weigh their
affection, and adding up all costly ad-
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# Love
2’
vantages, friends, opportunities, proper-
ties, exult in discovering that willingly,
joyfully, they would give all as a
ransom for the beautiful, the beloved
head, not one hair of which shall be
harmed. But the lot of humanity is
on these children. Danger, Sorrow,
and pain arrive to them, as to all.
Love prays. It makes covenants with
Eternal Power, in behalf of this dear
mate. The union which is thus af-
fected, and which adds a new value to
every atom in nature, for it trans-
mutes every thread throughout the
whole web of relation into a golden
ray, and bathes the soul in a new and
sweeter element, is yet a temporary
state. Not always can flowers, pearls,
poetry, protestations, nor even home
in another heart, content the awful
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Love #
soul that dwells in clay. It arouses
itself at last from these endearments,
as toys, and puts on the harness, and
aspires to vast and universal aims.
The soul which is in the soul of each,
craving for a perfect beatitude, detects
incongruities, defects, and dispropor-
tion in the behaviour of the other.
Hence arises surprise, expostulation,
and pain. Yet that which drew them
to each other was signs of loveliness,
signs of virtue: and these virtues are
there, however eclipsed. They appear
and reappear, and continue to attract;
but the regard changes, quits the sign,
and attaches to the substance. This
repairs the wounded affection. Mean-
time, as life wears on, it proves a
game of permutation and combination
of all possible positions of the parties,
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# Love
to extort all the resources of each,
and acquaint each with the whole
strength and weakness of the other.
For, it is the nature and end of this
relation, that they should represent the
human race to each other. All that
is in the world, which is or ought to
be known, is cunningly wrought into
the texture of man, of woman.
“The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”
The world rolls: the circumstances
vary, every hour. All the angels that
inhabit this temple of the body appear
at the windows, and all the gnomes
and vices also. By all the virtues,
they are united. If there be virtue,
all the vices are known as such ; they
confess and flee. Their once flaming
8o -
Love #
regard is sobered by time in either
breast, and losing in violence what it
gains in extent, it becomes a thorough
good understanding. They resign each
other, without complaint, to the good
offices which man and woman are
severally appointed to discharge in time,
and exchange the passion which once
could not lose sight of its object, for
a cheerful, disengaged furtherance,
whether present or absent, of each
other’s designs. At last they discover
that all which at first drew them to-
those once sacred features,
gether
that magical play of charms — was
deciduous, had a prospective end, like
the scaffolding by which the house
was built; and the purification of the
intellect and the heart, from year to
year, is the real marriage, foreseen and
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# Love
prepared from the first, and wholly
above their consciousness. Looking at
these aims with which two persons, a
man and a woman, so variously and
correlatively gifted, are shut up in one
house to spend in the nuptial society
forty or fifty years, I do not wonder
at the emphasis with which the heart
prophesies this crisis from early in-
fancy, at the profuse beauty with
which the instincts deck the nuptial
bower, and nature and intellect and
art emulate each other in the gifts and
the melody they bring to the epithala-
mium.
Thus are we put in training for a
love which knows not sex, nor person,
nor partiality, but which seeketh virtue
and wisdom everywhere, to the end of
increasing virtue and wisdom. We are
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Love #
by nature observers, and thereby learn-
ers. That is our permanent state. But
we are often made to feel that our
affections are but tents of a night.
Though slowly and with pain, the
objects of the affections change, as
the objects of thought do, there are
moments when the affections rule and
absorb the man, and make his happi-
ness dependent on a person or persons.
But in health the mind is presently
seen again,_ its overarching vault,
bright with galaxies of immutable
lights, and the warm loves and fears
that swept over us as clouds, must lose
their infinite character, and blend with
God, to attain their own perfection.
But we need not fear that we can lose
anything by the progress of the soul.
The soul may be trusted to the end.
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# Love
That which is so beautiful and attract-
ive as these relations, must be suc-
ceeded and supplanted only by what
is more beautiful, and so on for
eVer.
THE END.
84
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