Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/22

 14 a perpetual source of the dearest and most precious thing on earth, the easy interchange, conflict, and contact of friends with friends—the best recipe for all this was to have there a great scholar, unable to hear a word until it was dropped into the silver trumpet, yet giving edge, guidance, direction, and inspiration to all the flow of mutual utterance that has run in this well-worn channel for twoscore years.

To do this was more like his very self than all his throned volumes; and I am not sure but that, in the great chancery of existence, it is better worth while to have made friends gay, high-spirited, and ready to give a frolic welcome to all the years as they came than to be known ever after, as he will be, as foremost in his great field. It was like him to concentrate all his social life on this one group. Elsewhere he was always sought and scarcely seen, though his house was graced by an open hospitality the loss of which in time he made up by night work. How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! It was like him resolutely to keep this dinner of high talk and plain fare, with men who dined much and well elsewhere, to a dollar apiece, as a constant protest against a lavish age which kills all by