Page:Friendship, love & marriage (1910) Thoreau.djvu/22

 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 them 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 Mussulmans 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 in one sense 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. Oh, how I think of you! You are purely good— 16