and fresh and eternal, occupying the place of the old one, when to the common eye a dust has settled on the universe? which world cannot else be reached, and does not exist.  What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired?  It is wonderful that they were ever uttered.  They are few and rare, indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory.  All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart.  We should not dare to repeat these now aloud.  We are not competent to hear them at all times.

The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends.  They mean associates and confidants merely.  “Know that the contrariety of foe and Friend proceeds from God.”  Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result.  No professions nor advances will avail.  Even speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it; but it follows after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves till long after the graft has taken.  It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.  We are all Mussulmen and fatalists in this respect.  Impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do something kind whenever they meet; they must never be cold.  But they who are Friends do not do what they think they must, but what they must.  Even their Friendship is to some extent but a sublime phenomenon to them.

The true and not despairing Friend will address his Friend in some such terms as these.

“I never asked thy leave to let me love thee,—­I have a right.  I love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which I have found.  O, how I think of you!  You are purely good, —­you are infinitely good.  I can trust you forever.  I did not think that humanity was so rich.  Give me an opportunity to live.”

“You are the fact in a fiction,—­you are the truth more strange and admirable than fiction.  Consent only to be what you are.  I alone will never stand in your way.”

“This is what I would like,—­to be as intimate with you as our spirits are intimate,—­respecting you as I respect my ideal.  Never to profane one another by word or action, even by a thought.  Between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance.”

“I have discovered you; how can you be concealed from me?”

The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him.  They cherish each other’s hopes.  They are kind to each other’s dreams.

Though the poet says, “’Tis the pre-eminence of Friendship to impute excellence,” yet we can never praise our Friend, nor esteem him praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any behavior, or ever treat us well enough.  That kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere can least of all consist with this relation, and no such affront can be offered to a Friend, as a conscious good-will, a friendliness which is not a necessity of the Friend’s nature.