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,[303] 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 at once 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.

15.  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.

16.  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.