_ FRIENDSHIP.
A RUDDY drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,--
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
VI. FRIENDSHIP.
We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.
Maugre 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
honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street,
or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly
rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering
eye-beams. The heart knoweth.
The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is
a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common
speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which
are felt towards others are likened to the material
effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active,
more cheering, 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 increase 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 hand, with
chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-
respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of
a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected
and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt 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 commended 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 related in conversation and action
with 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, graceful,
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
intrude 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, ignorance, misapprehension
are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the
order, the dress and the dinner,--but the throbbing of
the heart and the communications of the soul, no more.
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which
make a young world for me again? What so delicious
as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in
a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach 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; nothing 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.
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 himself 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 substantiate 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 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 derides and cancels the thick walls of
individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at
which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High
thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world
for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of
all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard,--
poetry without stop,--hymn, ode and epic, poetry still
flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these
too separate 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,
wherever 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 affections. A new person
is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep. I have
often had fine fancies about persons which have given me
delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields
no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very
little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's
accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in
his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the
lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We
over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness
seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his
temptations less. Every thing 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, beholding his maiden,
half knows that she is not verily that which he
worships; 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 virtues in which
he shines, and afterwards 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 mining for the metaphysical foundation
of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the
things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them
for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful
than 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 amidst these pleasing reveries, though
it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man
who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently
of himself. He is conscious 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 consciousness tantamount
to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint,
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. 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. The instinct of affection revives
the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of
insulation 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 capacity, sure to match
my mood with thine, I 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 austere and eternal, of
one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have
aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden
sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden
of God, which many summers 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 association
must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower
and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual
disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and
gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long
foresight we must be tormented presently by baffled blows,
by sudden, unseasonable 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, 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,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."
Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and
apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization
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
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 common, 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 frostwork, but the solidest thing we
know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what
do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not 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 relation and honor its
law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant
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 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 speed
in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the
contempt of trifles. There are two elements 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 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
allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest
rank; that being permitted 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 approach of our fellow-man
by compliments, 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 religious frenzy cast off
this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace,
spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered,
and that 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 advantage of bringing every
man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No
man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of
putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms.
But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the
like plaindealing, 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. Almost every man we meet requires
some civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame,
some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his
head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all
conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who
exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me
entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my
part. 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 evidence to my own,
behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height,
variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so
that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of
nature.
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 circumstance and badge and trifle,
--but we can scarce believe that so much character 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
effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I
am the most devoted." I wish that friendship should have
feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself
on the ground, before it vaults 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
neighborhood; 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 find
the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet on the other
hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread
too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the
municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and
pity. I hate the prostitution of the 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 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 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.
Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and
costly, each so well tempered 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 its satisfaction can very seldom be assured.
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 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 intelligence. But I find
this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which
is the practice and consummation 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
when you leave them alone. In good company the individuals
merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive
with the several consciousnesses there present. No
partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses 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 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 individuals.
Conversation is an evanescent relation,--no more. A man is
reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, 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 me be alone to
the end of the world, rather than that my friend should
overstep, 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. I hate,
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. That high office requires 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 beheld, mutually feared, before yet
they recognize the deep identity which, beneath these
disparities, unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who
is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy;
who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let
him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its
ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the
eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We
talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.
Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a
spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and
that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close to
your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them
mount and expand. 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 noblest benefit.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation.
Why should we 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
touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message,
a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not
news, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and neighborly
conveniences 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 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 superiorities; wish him
not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard
him as thy counterpart. 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. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy 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 perfect 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
judgment, the entire relation. There can 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 how to say any thing 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 heart shall
speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers
you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips.
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have
a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by
getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the
faster from you, and you shall never catch 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 arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits
of society would be of any avail to establish us in such
relations 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
they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of
a man's own worthiness 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
congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of
follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in solitude,
and 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 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 spectres
and shadows merely.
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too
spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love.
Whatever correction 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 persons 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 mendicancy. 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 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, and the
harbinger of a greater friend.
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 cannot descend to converse. In the great
days, presentiments hover 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 moods, when I can well
afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall
regret the lost literature 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 receive from them not what
they have but what they are. They shall give me that which
properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them.
But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile
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 friendship greatly, on one side, without
due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber
myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious?
It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall
wide and vain into ungrateful 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 enlarged 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 disgrace to love unrequited. But the
great will see that true love cannot be unrequited.
True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and
broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask
crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth
and feels its independency 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 magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or
provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god,
that it may deify both. _