have been my good fortune, but I have never experienced either of these unfeeling conditions." Such also has been my own experience.

"Men talk of unkind hearts, kind deeds

With coldness still returning.

Alas! the gratitude of men

Has oftener left me mourning."

I cannot, then, agree with Emerson that "we walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere in other regions of the universal power souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which we can love."

No doubt, much as worthy friends add to the happiness and value of life, we must in the main depend on ourselves, and every one is his own best friend or worst enemy.

Sad, indeed, is Bacon's assertion that "there is little friendship in the world,

and least of all between equals, which was wont to be magnified. That that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the one to the other." But this can hardly be taken as his deliberate opinion, for he elsewhere says, "but we may go farther, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness." Not only, he adds, does friendship introduce "daylight in the understanding out of darkness and confusion of thoughts;" it "maketh a fair day in the affections from storm and tempests:" in consultation with a friend a man "tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation." "But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it

extendeth, for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love."

With this last assertion I cannot altogether concur. Surely even strangers may be most interesting! and many will agree with Dr. Johnson when, describing a pleasant evening, he summed it

we had a good talk."

up—“ Sir,

Epictetus gives excellent advice when he dissuades from conversation on the very subjects most commonly chosen, and advises that it should be on none of the common subjects—not about gladiators, nor horse - races, nor about athletes, nor about eating or drinking, which are the usual subjects; and especially not about men, as blaming them;" but when he adds, "or praising them," the injunction seems to me of doubtful value. Surely Marcus Aurelius more wisely advises that "when thou

wishest to delight thyself, think of the virtues of those who live with thee; for instance, the activity of one, and the modesty of another, and the liberality of a third, and some other good quality of a fourth. For nothing delights so much as the examples of the virtues, when they are exhibited in the morals of those who live with us and present themselves in abundance, as far as is possible. Wherefore we must keep them before us.' Yet how often we know merely the sight of those we call our friends, or the sound of their voices, but nothing whatever of their mind or soul.

We must, moreover, be as careful to keep friends as to make them. If every one knew what one said of the other, Pascal assures us that "there would not be four friends in the world." This I hope and think is too strong, but at any rate try to be one of the four. And when you have made a friend, keep

him. Hast thou a friend, says an Eastern proverb, "visit him often, for thorns and brushwood obstruct the road which no one treads." The affections should not be mere "tents of a night."

Still less does Friendship confer any privilege to make ourselves disagreeable. Some people never seem to appreciate their friends till they have lost them. Anaxagoras described the Mausoleum as the ghost of wealth turned into stone.

"But he who has once stood beside the grave to look back on the companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent then are the wild love and the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust.”1 Death, indeed, cannot sever friendship.

1 Ruskin.