“What is the secret of your life?” asked Mrs. Browning of
Charles Kingsley; “tell me, that I may make mine beautiful,
too.” He replied, “I had a friend.” Somewhere in her
“Middlemarch,” George Eliot puts it well: “There are natures in
which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of
baptism and consecration; they bind us over to rectitude and
purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become the
worst kind of sacrilege, which tears down the invisible altar of
trust.”--WILLIAM C. GANNETT.
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