Essays — First Series
scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the
intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage,
foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their
consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and
a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one
house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not
wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from
early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the
nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in
the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.
Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person,
nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the
end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and
thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to
feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and
with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of
thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the
man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in
health the mind is presently seen again,—its overarching vault, bright
with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that
swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with
God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can
lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to
the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations,
must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so
on for ever.
VI.
FRIENDSHIP
A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,—
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
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:—
DEAR FRIEND,
If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with
thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings
and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable, and I
respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not
presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a