on the strand. 
      Whether he ponders men or books,
      Always still he seaward looks,
      Marine news he ever reads,
      And the slightest glances heeds,
      Feels the sea breeze on his cheek,
      At each word the landsmen speak,
      In every companion’s eye
      A sailing vessel doth descry;
      In the ocean’s sullen roar
      From some distant port he hears,
      Of wrecks upon a distant shore,
      And the ventures of past years.

Who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of Tadmore of the desert?  There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims.  It has no temple, nor even a solitary column.  There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore.  The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.

However, our fates at least are social.  Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre.  Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it.  We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it.

Mencius says:  “If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, he does not know how to seek them again. . . .  The duties of practical philosophy consist only in seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.”

One or two persons come to my house from time to time, there being proposed to them the faint possibility of intercourse.  They are as full as they are silent, and wait for my plectrum to stir the strings of their lyre.  If they could ever come to the length of a sentence, or hear one, on that ground they are dreaming of!  They speak faintly, and do not obtrude themselves.  They have heard some news, which none, not even they themselves, can impart.  It is a wealth they can bear about them which can be expended in various ways.  What came they out to seek?

No word is oftener on the lips of men than Friendship, and indeed no thought is more familiar to their aspirations.  All men are dreaming of it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is enacted daily.  It is the secret of the universe.  You may thread the town, you may wander the country, and none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everywhere busy about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect affects our behavior toward all new men and women, and a great many old ones.  Nevertheless, I can remember only two or three essays on this subject in all literature.  No wonder that the Mythology, and Arabian Nights, and Shakespeare, and Scott’s