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'fire in winter,' like shade in summer, meat and drink to him that is hungry and athirst: Democritus' collyrium is not so sovereign to the eyes as this is to the heart."

The gifts of friendship are especially abundant in the line of sympathy. 'Quid dulcius,' says Cicero, 'quam habere quicum omnia audeas sic loqui ut tecum?' The power of this feeling is unlimited to unlock hearts that we may share their treasures, and to breed that instinctive sympathetic mutuality of intelligence which makes every delicate filament of the soul responsive to the slightest appeal. It leads us on by its innate forces to entertain common purposes with one another, to unchain the spirit in mutual unreserve, and to bid defiance to those recalcitrant hauteurs and shynesses which keep men strangers and apart. Hence, common labors and joint achievements, impossible otherwise. Hence delicate discernments, and simultaneous appreciations, and melting consciousness, all contributing their stores to the wealth of our souls, until the sympathetic friend grows the richest of human kind in the uncorruptible, imperishable riches of the spirit.

Is it quite possible to estimate how much richer the life of Orestes is made by Pylades, the life of any man by his true friend? What an armour of proof against cares and evils that man wears! What a poor, helpless, narrow existence his would be, deprived of that confidant with whom he is wont 'to compare miods and cherish private virtues! A man's friend is his stronghold, his defence, his body guard. Nothing can countervail him, nor can his services be weighed in a balance. He supports us over the sloughs of despond that fie beyond along all our paths through life; he touches us with the inspiration of courage for all our endeavors. His aid is a substantial force; his counsel a clear and shining light. We give him our trust, our confidence, and he shares with us all the treasures of his soul. He is another self, continually doing for us all those things we cannot do for ourselves. He publishes what we would have known about us; he defends us where our own tongues are constrained to silence; he takes

35 Burton.

up our unfinished work, and supplements our achievements with the zeal of his own devoted endeavor. 'A man can scarce allege his own merits with modesty, much less extol them; a man cannot sometimes brook to supplicate or beg; but all these things are graceful in a friend's mouth which are blushing in a man's own. When he reproves us, we are submissive as to the voice of conscience, for we have faith in the motive that impels him. When he praises us, we are set aglow with not unreasonable pride, for his praises are just as the sense within us of worthy performance. We turn to him for the amendment of our faults, knowing that we shall not turn in vain. His counsel has an authority derived from our own best interests which we know he seeks; and his sharpness is salutary and tonic, never souring upon the stomach of our pride. His frown is even 'better than a fool's smile,' and we are eager to have him tell us our faults, so that we may remove them ere they are discovered by our enemies.

The 'interior recompenses' of friendship are greater even than its endowments for our material life. The love and companionship of friends puts a power within us to burst 'the prison-house of life' and enjoy existence freely. The firm, loving touch of human hands is full of thrilling impulses to a sensitive spirit. That contact warms us to poetry, nerves us to action, invigorates us after defeat. It is a 'balm to hurt souls.' Grief perishes away before it, as mists vanish before the strong-shining sun. 'Peace in the affections, support in the judgment,' comfort in affliction, health in disease, hope in despair,—this is friendship. In the presence of this sentiment, selfishness dies a sudden and violent death. It suspects and tears away the cunningest disguises of envy, and the hideous sallow mask of jealousy is turned to stone in the beaming radiance of its cheerful face. Adversity is proverbially the test of friendship. How significant this is of the high and sacred offices we ascribe to it. We shall not need to hunt far to find those who will gladly share our prosperity, and partake in our joys; but it is only the true friend whom we make the

36 Bacon.

participant of our cares, and our refuge in the evil days. We make of this high sentiment, indeed, a perfect storehouse of provisions for the sustenance of our moral and emotional nature. There is a period in the life of every sensitive spirit, that period when youth is something sated and languid from excess, when the ideal begins to wane and grow dim, and the heart is chafed and sore by collisions with its own contradictions and if friendship do not come at this time, to brighten and confirm us in new views and new relations of life, we are well nigh certain to run over into melancholy and Wertherism, or to relapse into sneering, chilly Heineism. The vision of youth, gay and illusive, like the fleeting glow of sunset, is gone, but friendship comes in with a truer and purer light to take its place; and, with a step, we pass from the dreams of expectancy to the realities of being-from play to manhood and its labors. 'I seem to have enjoyed life,' Cicero makes Lælius say, 'simply because I have lived with Scipio.' The true friend supplies food to our ideality still, and prevents the heart from contracting, by sparing it the consciousness of emptiness. Most of the joys of man are simply 'preparations for joy,' but friendship gives bliss substantial food, not inviting it to any Barmecide feast, but to a candid wholesome meal, of solid comforts, excellent provisions, ripe fruits of consciousness, delicate wines of emotion,-a banquet made jubilant also with choice music, choicely played,-'new melodies from the canon of love.' There cannot be any greater charm than that which lies in the quick collision of noble spirits with our own, and the sparks of tender and grateful emotions thus struck forth. These emotions make us seem larger and freer and greater than we really are, because they exalt us to be all that we possibly can be. At their urging and insistance every power of the soul is excited to its utmost capacity, and every fine feeling and mystic sympathy within us is called into throb and action.

'And joyous was our feast; pathetic talk,
And wit, and harmony of choral strains-
While far Orion o'er the waves did walk

That flow among the isles-held us in chains
Of sweet captivity, which none disdains
Who feels.7

37 Shelley.

38

There is no satiety in friendship. "Sooner or later we enjoy only souls,' but that enjoyment lasts, and never palls upon the taste. It is like good wine, which gains in delicacy and pungency of flavor by being kept. For friendship is never extravagant nor hyperbolical. It does not waste itself by friction. It does not exhaust its energies by tours de force. It flows on like a river along a deep and even channel, sedate, serene, unbroken. It is a carefully modulated harmony, 'the economy of desire," the true tact of enjoyment, the even pulse of life. Love kindles, shoots blazing upwards to the sky, bursts, trembles, and expires, a sudden meteor, brilliant, intensive, momentary. Friendship holds the empyrean already, and moves onward there serene and cheerful, ‘like a star, unhasting but unresting.' This, then, is the poetic and ideal perfection of human life, this magnetic unity of select souls, 'a union without organs, pure, perfect, and ever-growing;'-'this highest point of all desire,' this 'purest joy of earth,' this noblest and sweetest capacity of man, this sublime and glorious development of the God in us, this friendship!

NOTE. We are not, of course, responsible for every line or sentiment which appears in the Southern Review. In the above article, for example, there are a few reflections on the sex to which we cannot subscribe. Even if we could believe them just, we should not dislike them the less; for why should we dwell on the faults of the fairest part of creation, or on our own excellencies to their disparagement? Is it generous or gallant or manly, to make such a use of our literary opportunities? The above article is so well written, and several other contributions from the same writer are so admirable, that we have let his occasional flings at the sex pass, without a mutilation of his pages. But we here give him fair notice, as well as all other contributors to the Southern Review, that such liberties with the sex shall never again be taken in our pages. We have too a quarrel with Jean Paul, whom the writer brings in as a witness to woman's incapacity for friendship. We utterly discredit his testimony, and turn him out of court disgraced. He once imagined, he tells us, that he had at last found one woman in whose friendship he dreamed, for a while, he might be happy; but, alas! ere long she only vexed his righteous soul with manifestations of her pestiferous love. It was all his own fault. He had no business to be so handsome-such an incorrigible 'lady-killer.' If he had only been comfortably ugly, no foolish moth of the sex would, we can most positively assert, have troubled him with its buzzings about the blaze of his beauty. True women, on the contrary, would have been his friends, and he would have formed a much better opinion of woman. His vanity, at least, would never have had occasion to utter its complaints against the love of women for himself; complaints which, iftrue, he should have been ashamed to publish to the world. As a 'modest man of genius,' he should have kept them all to himself. If, in fact, he never found friendship in woman, it was only because, however great his genius, he did not deserve it. Take that, friend Paul, for thy disloyalty to woman, and go thy way, never more venturing before our critical tripod as a witness against the 'fairest of God's creation,' the 'last and best.'

38 Cicero.

39 Herder.

ART. V.-The Reign of Law. By the Duke of Argyll. Fifth Edition. London. 1867.

This is a work of large design, its object being to shew the immutability of the relation of cause and effect, as exhibited in the forces of nature and in the mind of man. These forces may be modified and overborne by opposing forces, but never, it seems, suspended, since the effect is in every case a resultant from the combined action of all. The Deity himself, in working His own high will, does not, and possibly (at least the reader is pardoned such a doubt) cannot, supersede their authority or abridge their dominion. Whatever end the Divine purpose requires appears to be accomplished, as with man His 'co-worker', by employing the proper contrivances; to borrow the noble author's own words, by knowing how to do it: nor does he exempt even miracles and the work of creation from the same despotic law.

With matter so deep and dangerous it is not our purpose here to meddle, as our remarks will be confined to the mechanical laws which we find in force on our globe, without speculating as to the indestructibility of the tenure by which they hold their sway. In the author's third chapter, entitled 'Contrivance a Necessity', he draws his illustrations from the flight of birds; a subject he has evidently studied with much interest and with a high a preciation of the scientific wisdom displayed in the adaptation of particular structures to their purposed ends. Some of his views on the general subject we will briefly examine, and then proceed to exhibit our own, which, as will be seen, differ in fundamental points from those presented by his Grace.

It is not strange that, in all ages, men should have been ambitious to fly, like the birds, and should have believed the problem within reach of human ingenuity. Flying is chiefly a mechanical art: it is but the adjustment of physical forces.

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