Part 28 (1/2)
HELP OTHERS.
If any members of your family have the love of books, aid them in satisfying it. Such are the salt of the earth. They are the blazed trees in the dark forests of the present generations, to mark out that course which shall, in future ages, be the highway of the whole world.
FRIENDs.h.i.+P.
The friend thou hast, and his adoption tried, Grapple him to thy soul with hooks of steel.--Shakspeare.
I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd, ”How sweet, how pa.s.sing sweet is solitude!”
But grant me still a friend in my retreat, Whom I may whisper ”Solitude is sweet!”--Cowper.
”Whatever the number of a man's friends” says Lord Lytton, ”there are times in his life when he has one too few.” ”Life,”
says Sydney Smith, ”is to be fortified by many friends.h.i.+ps.” Says Bishop Hare: ”Friends.h.i.+p is love without its flowers or veil.” ”A faithful friend is the true image of the Deity,” said Napoleon, who never believed he had a true friend not a born fool. ”A friend loveth at all times,” says the Bible. Says Herr Gotthold: ”with a clear sky, a bright sun, and a gentle breeze, you will have friends in plenty, but let fortune frown and the firmament be overcast, and then your friends will prove
LIKE THE STRINGS OF THE LUTE,
of which you will tighten ten before you find one that will bear the stretch and keep the pitch.” ”What an argument in favor of social connections,” says Lord Greville, ”is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasures we have more.” Horace Walpole has given clear expression to one of the chief pleasures of friends.h.i.+p:
”OLD FRIENDS
are the great blessings of one's latter years. Half a word conveys one's meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking. I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is affectionate, but can they grow old friends? My age forbids that. Still less can they grow companions. Is it friends.h.i.+p to explain half one says? One must relate the history of one's memory and ideas; and what is that to the young but old stories?” ”Fast won, fast lost,” says Shakspeare. Says Dr. Johnson: ”If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man should keep his friends.h.i.+ps in constant repair!”
ALL THROUGH THE WRITINGS OF THE SAGES
on this subject there is a tinge of melancholy. ”There are no friends!”
says Aristotle. ”There have been fewer friends on earth than Kings,” says the poet Cowley. Why is this? Let us peer into the solemn question. The ideal of true manhood is easily formulated. Alas! what an abyss separates a man's daily life, as it is, from that high quality he has pictured in his imagination. We are all the time reaching for
THINGS WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND,
and could not a.s.similate with if they were placed at our disposal. In this way a weary, well-read novel-reader, worn out in all lines of light letters, enters a circulating library, and queruously asks: ”Have you any new books?” She expects a negative answer, and in that case would suffer a keen disappointment. The man says ”Yes,” and brings out several new books. Every one of these is new in every sense. It may be the most trivial set of pages yet printed in this era of scribblers, or, yet, it may be a great work, worthy of the attention of the thoughtful, and the commendation of the pure in heart. n.o.body can tell. Then, illogically, she asks: ”Is this good?” or ”Is that good?” and upon being reminded that she wanted something new or nothing, she asks for something by May Agnes Fleming, or Mary Jane Holmes, and goes off happy, to re-read those expressions which have so well pleased her in the past.
I think I espy in this exhibition of the working of the mind in a rude and unsatisfactory state
A GENERAL PRINCIPLE,
just as potent in the mighty brain of Sir Isaac Newton or of Louis Aga.s.siz. Man idealizes the affair of friends.h.i.+p. He forgets whether he really wants it or not, and then persistently inquires for it. It is not in the library of possibilities. He therefore goes off angry and disappointed. Could he get a glimpse at it, I am afraid he would walk away satisfied with something more nearly en rapport with his nature and his habits. Let us view this golden word friends.h.i.+p as man idealizes it: Being a changeable thing, he views friends.h.i.+p (of which he knows nothing), entirely by comparison with something of which in its turn he knows but little. This something is always a mother's love for her son, notorious as the strongest affection shown by our species. He therefore doubles up this marvelous fact of a mother's love, and creates in his imagination a reciprocatory agency co-respondent to this mother's love.
Now, with this magnificent product of invention, he goes forth into the world, seeking for some man upon whom he may bestow a mother's love (of which the ”bestower” is entirely incapable), and who will, in payment, respond with a mother's love (of which that man would, of course, be also incapable). In the jargon of electricity a positive and a negative are absolutely necessary to electric energy.
A MOTHER'S LOVE
is a deplorably one-sided action, but it is the highest and n.o.blest of the faculties of affection. Anything beyond it is ideal, made up of two positives, and a thousand years ahead of us. Is it any wonder that when man makes his experiments with the mother's love which he supposes himself capable of bestowing that a universal wail arises, or that Shakspeare, the greatest of mortal minds, brought in those awful verdicts against mankind--”Lear” and ”Timon of Athens”?