Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/191

 condition which high friendship demands is, ability to do without it. To be capable of that high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be my two before there can be my one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognise the deep identity which beneath their disparities unites them.

“He is only fit for this society who is magnanimous. He must be so to know its law. He must be one who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy, He must be one who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not dare to intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We must not be wilful, we must not provide. We talk of choosing our friends, but our friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course, if he be a man, he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honour. If you must needs hold him close to your person, stand aside—give those merits room—let them mount and expand. Be not so much his friend that you can never know his peculiar energies, like fond mammas who shut up their boy in the house until he has almost grown a girl. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to boys and girls to regard a friend as a property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of the pure nectar of God.



“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real, so equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy,