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 becomes a little too high-flown, because he is suspicious of even cementing friendship by actual services. The Stoics held that friendship was only possible for the wise man; and Emerson thinks that it requires such 'rare and costly' natures that it can seldom be realised. It is the product of the spontaneous affinity of the soul, which must be independent of all external circumstance or reciprocity of kind actions. In the essay, where he manages to give a new charm even to the ancient topic of Love, he puts a more acceptable theory. He speaks in a prose-poem, which reminds us of Mr. Meredith's 'Love in a Valley,' of the recollection 'of the days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the rubbish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the writer who said of love—

All other pleasures are not worth its pains;

and when the day was not enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers, and the air was carved into song; when all business seemed an