If I but love that virtue which he is,
     Though it be scented in the morning air,
     Still shall we be truest acquaintances,
     Nor mortals know a sympathy more rare.

Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.  Fair and flitting like a summer cloud;—­there is always some vapor in the air, no matter how long the drought; there are even April showers.  Surely from time to time, for its vestiges never depart, it floats through our atmosphere.  It takes place, like vegetation in so many materials, because there is such a law, but always without permanent form, though ancient and familiar as the sun and moon, and as sure to come again.  The heart is forever inexperienced.  They silently gather as by magic, these never failing, never quite deceiving visions, like the bright and fleecy clouds in the calmest and clearest days.  The Friend is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in Pacific seas.  Many are the dangers to be encountered, equinoctial gales and coral reefs, ere he may sail before the constant trades.  But who would not sail through mutiny and storm, even over Atlantic waves, to reach the fabulous retreating shores of some continent man?  The imagination still clings to the faintest tradition of

THE ATLANTIDES.

The smothered streams of love, which flow
More bright than Phlegethon, more low,
Island us ever, like the sea,
In an Atlantic mystery. 
Our fabled shores none ever reach,
No mariner has found our beach,
Scarcely our mirage now is seen,
And neighboring waves with floating green,
Yet still the oldest charts contain
Some dotted outline of our main;
In ancient times midsummer days
Unto the western islands’ gaze,
To Teneriffe and the Azores,
Have shown our faint and cloud-like shores.

     But sink not yet, ye desolate isles,
     Anon your coast with commerce smiles,
     And richer freights ye’ll furnish far
     Than Africa or Malabar. 
     Be fair, be fertile evermore,
     Ye rumored but untrodden shore,
     Princes and monarchs will contend
     Who first unto your land shall send,
     And pawn the jewels of the crown
     To call your distant soil their own.

Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner’s compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them.  We are no nearer than Plato was.  The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and as it were in a straight line.

      Sea and land are but his neighbors,
      And companions in his labors,
      Who on the ocean’s verge and firm land’s end
      Doth long and truly seek his Friend. 
      Many men dwell far inland,
      But he alone sits