When this courtship came to effect in due season (for that which they do not require in the lover, namely, leisure and discretion in his pursuit, they strictly require in the person loved, forasmuch as he is to judge of an internal beauty, of difficult knowledge and abstruse discovery), then there sprung in the person loved the desire of a spiritual conception; by the mediation of a spiritual beauty.  This was the principal; the corporeal, an accidental and secondary matter; quite the contrary as to the lover.  For this reason they prefer the person beloved, maintaining that the gods in like manner preferred him too, and very much blame the poet AEschylus for having, in the loves of Achilles and Patroclus, given the lover’s part to Achilles, who was in the first and beardless flower of his adolescence, and the handsomest of all the Greeks.  After this general community, the sovereign, and most worthy part presiding and governing, and performing its proper offices, they say, that thence great utility was derived, both by private and public concerns; that it constituted the force and power of the countries where it prevailed, and the chiefest security of liberty and justice.  Of which the healthy loves of Harmodius and Aristogiton are instances.  And therefore it is that they called it sacred and divine, and conceive that nothing but the violence of tyrants and the baseness of the common people are inimical to it.  Finally, all that can be said in favour of the Academy is, that it was a love which ended in friendship, which well enough agrees with the Stoical definition of love: 

              “Amorem conatum esse amicitiae faciendae
               ex pulchritudinis specie.”

["Love is a desire of contracting friendship arising from the beauty
of the object.”—­Cicero, Tusc.  Quaes., vi. 34.]

I return to my own more just and true description: 

“Omnino amicitiae, corroboratis jam confirmatisque,
et ingeniis, et aetatibus, judicandae sunt.”

     ["Those are only to be reputed friendships that are fortified and
     confirmed by judgement and the length of time.” 
     —­Cicero, De Amicit., c. 20.]

For the rest, what we commonly call friends and friendships, are nothing but acquaintance and familiarities, either occasionally contracted, or upon some design, by means of which there happens some little intercourse betwixt our souls.  But in the friendship I speak of, they mix and work themselves into one piece, with so universal a mixture, that there is no more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined.  If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer:  because it was he, because it was I. There is, beyond all that I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and fated power that brought on this union.  We sought one another long before we met, and by the characters we heard