Friendship

(1) We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Although all the selfishness chills the world like east winds, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor and who honor us! (How many we see in the street. or sit with in church, whom, though silently. we warmly rejoice 10 be with!) Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knows.

(2) The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain friendly excitement. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotion of kindness and satisfaction which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much swift, more active, more cheering, are those fine inward irradiation. (From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of goodwill. they make sweetness of life.)

(3) Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not equip him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend-and forthwith troops of gentle thought invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.

(4) See, in any house where virtue and self-respect wait, the excitement which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and announced, and uneasiness between pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged to the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we often do. (We have the nimblest fancy. a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time.)For long hours we can continue a seriesof sincere, graceful, rich communication, drawn from the oldest secret experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his (partialities), his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. He is no more strange now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he.comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner,-but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more.

(5) What is so pleasant as these streams of affection which make a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought. in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is transformed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all boredom, vanish, -all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should. rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

(6) I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the beautiful, who daily shows himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society. I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass. my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all the time. Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relation; and as many thoughts. in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditional globe.

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