FRIENDSHIP

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the

selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human

family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many

persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we

honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in

church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the

language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain

cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech, the emotions of

benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened

to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more

active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the

highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good-will,

they make the sweetness of life.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The

scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not

furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is

necessary to write a letter to a friend,—and forthwith troops of gentle

thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in

any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which

the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and

announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the

hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good

hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into

their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get

up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report

is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to

us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him,

we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such

a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with

him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a

richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For

long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich

communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that

they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a

lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger

begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into

the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and

best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity,

ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes,

he may get the order, the dress and the dinner,—but the throbbing of

the heart and the communications of the soul, no more.

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world

for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in

a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this

beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The

moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is

no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish,—all duties

even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant

of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the

universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and

cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old

and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth

himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and

yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the

noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who

understands me, becomes mine,—a possession for all time. Nor is Nature

so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave

social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many

thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by

stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and

pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought.

The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity

of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I but the Deity in me

and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual

character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually

connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent

lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and

enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the

first Bard,—poetry without stop,—hymn, ode and epic, poetry still

flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these too separate

themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it

not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple

affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same

affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men

and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is

almost dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison of misused wine” of

the affections. A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from

sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me

delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit.

Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I must

feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, and a

property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the

lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate

the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our

goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is

his,—his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments,—fancy

enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy

in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the

soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half

knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden

hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and

unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he

shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this

divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it

respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same

condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by

mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I

not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know

them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their

appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root

of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and

festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the

bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an

Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with his thought

conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a universal

success, even though bought by uniform particular failures. No

advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match for him. I

cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I

cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star

dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of

the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see

well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is

at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast

shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted

immensity,—thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art

not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,—thou art not my soul, but a

picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already

thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth

friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the

germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is

alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the

opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into

a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a

season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method

betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The

instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the

returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man

passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record

his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new

candidate for his love:—