Produced by Edmund Dejowski

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN.

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN BY WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.

A GENTLE BUSINESS AND BECOMING
THE ACTION OF GOOD WOMEN.
Shakespeare.

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1868.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867 by
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court
of the District of Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON.

TO ANNA CABOT LODGE, A TRUE AND GENEROUS FRIEND, THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED WITH THE DEEPEST SENTIMENTS OF ESTEEM AND GRATITUDE

PREFACE.

A STATEMENT of the facts in which this book began may gratify the curiosity of some of its readers.

While gathering materials for a History of Friendship, I was often struck both by the small number of recorded examples of the sentiment among women, which were discovered in my researches, and by the commonness of the expressed belief, that strong natural obstacles make friendship a comparatively feeble and rare experience with them. Spurred by further thought, as well as by many talks, I kept on exploring the subject. At length, so much matter was mustered that I determined to insert in my work a distinct chapter on the Friendships of Women. Still the subject grew in interest for me, and the bulk of historic illustration swelled beyond the size of a chapter. Then I decided to make a little treatise of it by itself.

The principle and sentiment of friendship deserve a much larger share of the attention given, alike in the life and the literature of our time, to the passion of love. One would infer from most of the popular writings of the day, that love is the only emotion worthy of notice. But surely there are in human nature other feelings, which demand far more culture than they generally receive, feelings which really play an important part in human life, and which ought to play a still more important part. Am I deceived in thinking, that, in particular, the place of friendship in the Live; of women is a subject which, if soundly discussed, and set forth with mastery and sympathy, may give precious guidance, comfort, and inspiration to thousands of embittered and languishing souls? Will not the large number, who are denied the satisfactions of impassioned love, be grateful for a book which shows them what rich and noble resources they may find in his widely different, though closely kindred, sentiment? Is not such a book especially needed at he present time?

In method of treatment, I have, without neglecting moral analysis or reflective exposition, even greater prominence to biographic narrative, living presentation of instances from which the reader may draw the befitting lessons of the topic, and apply them for personal profit. Poetry, it has been said, is balm on the wounds of non- fulfilment in our lives. When our own experience and imagination are wanting in that balm, we must borrow it from others. If we muse, with open heart, on the enthusiastic dreams and fruitions of more richly impassioned or more happily placed natures, the contagious glow of their affections may enkindle ours. This is one of the highest uses of art, a use which puts on artists the duty of setting before their patrons sights of righteousness and bliss, trust and peace, rather than sights of wretchedness, wrangling, doubt, and error.

In conjoined importance and interest, to those who have a taste for it, no other study can compare with the study of human nature and human experience, as illustrated in individual examples. If the students are curious as to the secrets of greatness, and are emulous of excellence, the attraction is enhanced when they deal with persons of extraordinary powers and careers. It then becomes fascinating. Beautiful and noble characters can find nothing so enchanting as a beautiful and noble character. It was truly said by Vauvenargues, "Sooner or later, we enjoy only souls." These pages will present portrayals of a large number of charming souls, with accounts of their happiest experiences. For our poor human heart, there will always be a bewitchment about the memories of those persons who were either remarkable for their power of drawing affection or were signalized by their enjoyment of the boon. Many a rare character, otherwise long ago consumed in the alembic of time, will long continue to be fondly singled out and studied. So when the famous Marchioness of Salisbury was accidentally burned to death, the Skeleton was known as hers only by the jewels with which she had been decked.

It may be dangerous to overlook ignorantly what is false and hateful in society; but it is pernicious to pick out such objects for exclusive or permanent scrutiny. The most wholesome results are likely to be secured by the fastening of our attention prevailingly on what is true and fair and blessed in our fellow-beings. Such a choice will commend itself to the best spirits; for, while it is the spontaneous movement of a mean nature to contract and swoop, a generous nature prefers to expand and soar. The vulture pounces on rottenness with a cry of obscene satisfaction; but the lark seeks the sunrise with a song of worship. So let the ingenuous mind, studying human character and life, bestow a shunning glance at evil, a fixed gaze on good. So, should any one wish to write a history of the enmities of women, for which, doubtless, the materials are ample, I willingly yield him the task, appropriating only the privilege of doing justice to their friendships.

In the present volume, my first and constant purpose has been boldly to state the truth just as it is, to do justice to the facts of the subject. My second purpose has been to be of use, to give help and comfort. In whatever degree poetry and ideal sentiment may be accompaniments, neither of them has in any sense been made an aim of the work. While freely allowing his mind to shine into his pen, and his heart to flow through it, the writer has adopted every precaution to prevent or correct all those refractions of ignorance and prejudice, and all that coloring of morbid sentimentality, which would stand in the way of truth and use. In treating such a theme as friendship, the worst dangers are hardness and levity on the one extreme, exaggeration and mawkishness on the other, and cowardice and squeamishness between. These faults, it is hoped, are not chargeable on the following pages.

This book is a book of goodness. It is devoted to the nurture of those benign virtues which it so plainly shows waiting on and winning the best beauty and joy of the world. Small causes can bring about great effects, when time and facts conspire to help them. A cocoanut, tossed by the waves into a little sand on a rock amidst the ocean, has been known to strike root, and to form the centre of a luxuriant island of palms. Unable to look for any such striking result from the influence of this work, I shall be happy, indeed, if the power of the examples to which I have here given voice shall demonstrate the other side of the deep thought penned by Shakespeare: One good deed, dying tongueless, Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

HAVE WOMEN NO FRIENDSHIPS?

FRIENDSHIP INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE TIES OF BLOOD

FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN

FRIENDSHIPS OF MOTHERS AND SONS

Cornelia and the Gracchi.
Olympias and Alexander.
Monica and Augustine.
John Quincy Adams and His Mother.
Goethe and his Mother.
The Humboldts and their Mother.
Guizot and his Mother.

FRIENDSHIPS OF DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS

Tullia and Cicero.
Margaret Roper and Sir Thomas More.
Agnes and William Wirt.
Mary and John Evelyn.
Theodosia and Aaron Burr.
Maria and Richard Edgeworth.
Madame de Staël and Necker.
Letitia Landon and her Father.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS AND BROTHERS

Narcissus and his Reflection.
Electra and Orestes.
Antigone and Polynices.
Diana and Apollo.
Scholastica and Benedict.
Cornelia and Tasso.
Margaret and Francis.
Mary and Sir Philip Sidney.
Catherine and Robert Boyle.
Caroline and William Herschel.
Letitia and John Aikin.
Cornelia and Goethe.
Lena and Jacobi.
Lucile and Chateaubriand.
Charlotte and Schleiermacher.
Dorothy and Wordsworth.
Augusta and Byron.
Mary and Charles Lamb.
Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn.
Whittier and his Sister.
Eugénie and Maurice de Guérin.

FRIENDSHIPS OF WIVES AND HUSBANDS.

Count and Countess del Verme.
Lady and Sir James Mackintosh.
Aspasia and Pericles.
Portia and Brutus.
Arria and Pertus.
Paulina and Seneca.
Calpurnia and Pliny.
Timoxena and Plutarch.
Castara and Habington.
Faustina and Zappi.
Jeanne and Roland.
Caroline and Herder.
Lucy and John Hutchinson.
Sarah and John Austin.
Elizabeth and Robert Browning.
Leopold Schefer and his Wife.
John Stuart Mill and his Wife.
Lady and Lord William Russell.
Artemisia and Mausolus.
Moomtaza and Jehan.

PLATONIC LOVE; THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS

Relative Prevalence of Vice in our day.
Moral Influence of Friendships between Men and Women.
Analysis of Platonic Love.
Laura and Petrarch.
Beatrice and Dante.
Heloise and Abelard.
Danger and Safety of Platonic Love.
Countess Matilda and Hildebrand.
The "Woldemar" of Jacobi.
Influence of Chivalry in developing Friendships of Men and Women.
Causes of Prominent Social Position of Women in France.
Friendships in Catholic Church between Women and their Directors.
Olympias and Chrysostom.
Paula and Jerome.
Clara and Francis of Assissi.
Chantal and Francis of Sales.
Guion and Lacombe.
La Maisonfort and Fenelon.
Cornuau and Bossuet.
Theresa and John of the Cross.
The Friendship of Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo.
Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Pélisson.
Madame de Sévigné and Corbinelli.
Madame de la Fayette and Rochefoucauld.
Madame du Deffand and D'Alembert.
Mademoiselle Lespinasse and D'Alembert.
Madame de Staël and Montmorency.
Magdalen Herbert and Dr. Donne.
Lady Masham and John Locke.
Mary Unwin and Cowper.
Mrs. Clive and Garrick.
Hannah More and Langhorne.
Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott.
Duchess of Devonshire and Fox.
Duchess of Gordon and Dr. Beattie.
Charlotte and Humboldt.
Bettine and Goethe.
Goethe's Treatment of Women in his Life and in his Works.
Princess of Homburg and Marchioness di Barolo and
Silvio Pellico.
Isabel Fenwick and Wordsworth.
Harriet Martineau and Channing.
Lucy Aikin and Channing.
Frances Power Cobbe and Theodore Parker.
Friendships of Women and their Tutors.
Zenobia and Longinus.
Countess of Pembroke and Daniel.
Princess Elizabeth and Descartes.
Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz.
Lady Jane Grey and Elmer.
Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton.
Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier.
Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer.
Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson.
Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson.
Countess Ranelagh and Milton.
Duchess of Queensbury and Gay.
Relations with Women, of Sophocles, Virgil,
Frauenlob, Bernadin
St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Jean Paul Richter.
Rahel Levin and her Friendships with Men.
Madame Récamier and her Friendships with Men.
Elizabeth Barrett, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and John Kenyon.
Clotilde de Vaux and Auguste Comte.
Madame Swetchine and her Friendships with Men.

FRIENDSHIPS OF MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan
Madame de Rambouillet and Julie d'Angenne
Mrs. Browne and Felicia Hemans.
Naomi and Ruth.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS

Dido and Anna.
Hannah and Martha More.
Mary and Agnes Berry.
Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte.
Joanna and Agnes Baillie.

FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMAN WITH WOMAN

Treatment of Female Friendship in Literature.
School-girl Friendships.
Friendships in Conventual Life.
Jeanne Philippon and Angélique Boufflers.
Agnes Arnauld and Jacqueline Pascal.
Madame de Longueville and Angélique Arnauld.
Friendships between Queens and their Maids of Honor.
Sakoontali and Anastiya.
Marie de Medicis and Eleanora Galigäi.
Queen Philippa and Philippa Picard.
Lady Jane Beaufort and Catherine Douglas.
Mary Stuart and her Four Marys.
Queen Elizabeth and her Attendants.
Queen Anne and Sarah Jennings.
Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe.
Queen Hortense and Madame de Faverolles.

PAIRS OF FEMALE FRIENDS

Beatrice Portinari and Giovanna.
Dorothea Sydney and Sophia Murray.
Katherine Phillips and Regina Collier.
Elizabeth Rowe and the Countess of Hertford.
Countess of Pomfret and Countess of Hertford.
Lady Harley and Mrs. Montague.
Hannah More and Mrs. Garrick.
Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot.
Charlotte Smith and Lady O'Niel.
Anna Seward and Honora Sneyd.
The Countess of Northesk and Anna Seward.
Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby,
the Ladies of Llangollen.
Fanny Burney and Mrs. Thrale.
Günderode and Bettine Brentano.
Miss Benger and Lucy Aikin.
Lucy Aikin and Joanna Baillie.
Mrs. Hemans and Miss Jewshury.
Mary Mitford and Mrs. Browning.
Madame de Staid and Madame Récamier.
Madame Swetchine and the Countess Edling.
Countess D'Ossoli and the Marchioness Arconati.
The Duchess of Orleans and her Lady Companion.

THE NEEDS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN IN THIS AGE

Evils and Defects of Society and their Remedy.
The Ideal of Marriage.
Public Life versus Domestic Life.
Caste: Diminution of its Influence.
The Common Destiny, and the Peculiar Destiny, of Woman.
Life in the Harems of the East.
Right of Woman to every form of Education and Labor.
Grounds of the exclusion of Women from Public Life
The Right of Women to engage in Politics.
The Inexpediency of their doing so
Impartial Consideration of both sides of the Question.
Morality, eternal; Politics, temporary.
Gradual historic Emancipation of Woman.
Comparative Condition of Woman in the Oriental, the Classic,
the early Christian, and the Modern World.
Relation of Mohammed and of Jesus to Women.
Light thrown on the Condition of Women in Greece by the
History of Sappho.
Sentiment of Chivalry towards Woman.
Woman ennobled by sharing in great public Interests.
Decline of Letter-writing in our day.
Duty of Women to cultivate Conversation.
Duty of Women to cultivate the art of Manners.
Value of model Types of Women.
Disinterestedness, the Redemption of Man.
Woman as seen in Mythology.
Conclusion of the matter.
Friendship in the Future.

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN.

INTRODUCTION.

THE peculiar mission of woman, it has been said, is to be a wife and mother. Is it not as truly the peculiar mission of man to be a husband and father? If she is called to add to the happiness and worth of her husband, he is called to add to the happiness and worth of his wife. They are alike bound to protect and educate their children. And the other duties, the private improvement of self and the public improvement of society rest on them in common. The assertion, then, that the distinctive Office of woman is to be the helpmeet of man, does not imply that she ought to be legally or morally any more subservient to him than he to her; for the supreme duty of a woman, as of every other human being, is, through the perfecting of her own nature as a child of God, to fulfil her personal destiny in the universe. To love, to marry, to rear a family, is by no means an entire statement of the obligations and privileges of women: because no woman always has lover, husband, or children; many fail to have all of them in succession; and a few never have either of them.

In some of these cases the domestic appointment of woman is defeated; but her personal destiny may still De achieved. The qualities of her soul and the fruitions of her life, as a free individual, may be perfected in spite of this relative mutilation in her lot. The growing desire in our time for show and luxury, the increase of the excitements of publicity, the sensational literature of fiction, which is absorbing an ever-larger share of attention from the more sensitive portion of the feminine public, these causes are concentrating an undue interest on the passion of love. It is the almost exclusive theme of plays, novels, poems. One consequence is an exaggeration of the part that should be played by this sentiment in the experience of the individual. It comes to be the engrossing subject of regard. Life is considered a failure, unless it contains love, followed by marriage; yet it must often be deprived of this experience. In the most civilized countries, especially in their brilliant capitals, a higher and higher ratio of women miss of happy love and marriage.

There never were many morally baffled, uneasy, and complaining women on the earth as now; because never before did the capacities of intelligence and affection so greatly exceed their gratifications. New perceptions are the scouts of fresh desires; fresh desires precede their own fulfilment: a just reconciliation is a slow, historic process. The lives of a multitude of women all around us contain a large element of unsuccessful outward or inward ambitions, vain attempts and prayers. This drives them back upon themselves, into a deeper and sadder seclusion than that naturally imposed by their housekeeping and their historic withdrawment from the bustling businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of instances, a tragedy not less severe than unobtrusive is enacted, the tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements, arrangements both more economical and more truthful. In the mean time, every thing which tends to inflame the exclusive passion of love, to stimulate thought upon it, or to magnify its imagined importance, contributes so much to enhance the misery of its withholding or loss, and thus to augment an evil already lamentably extensive and severe.

Now, the most healthful and effective antidote for the evils of an extravagant passion is to call into action neutralizing or supplementary passions; to balance the excess of one power by stimulating weaker powers, and fixing attention on them; to assuage disappointments in one direction by securing gratifications in another. Accordingly, the offices of friendship in the lives of women, lives often so secluded, impoverished, and self-devouring, is a subject of emphatic timeliness; promising, if properly treated, to yield lessons of no slight practical value. This vein of sentiment has suffered unmerited neglect among us. No other vein of sentiment in human nature, perhaps, has so much need to be cherished. In the lives of women, friendship is, First, the guide to love; a preliminary stage in the natural development of affection. Secondly, it is the ally of love; the distributive tendrils and branches to the root and trunk of affection. Thirdly, it is, in some cases, the purified fulfilment and repose into which love subsides, or rises. Fourthly, it is, in other cases, the comforting substitute for love. A just display of these points, in the light of an accurate analysis, aided by the appropriate learning, can hardly fail to repay the study it will require. The insight into the nature and the working of the affections, to be secured by a careful study of the subject, should be a precious acquisition of knowledge easily convertible into power. The activity of the sympathies enkindled by tracing the biographical sketches of a large number of the richest and most winsome examples of feminine friendship preserved for us in history, should bestow a rare pleasure. And the plain directions to be deduced from the discussion and the narratives should furnish a store of instruction for the wiser guidance of personal experience.

The writer, as he is about to intrust his book upon that current of literature which flows by the doors of all the intelligent, bearing its offerings to their hands, is quite aware that the subject of the rights and the wrongs, the joys and the griefs, the hopes and the fears, the duties and the plans, belonging to the outer and inner life of womankind in the present age, happens just now to be one of the chief matters of popular interest and agitation. This, however, has had no influence in leading him to treat the subject. It has long been in his mind. He has been drawn to investigate it and write on it simply by its intrinsic attractions for him. But the extent and earnestness with which the public mind is preoccupied by the social and political discussions of the theme, going on in all quarters, much increase the difficulty of treating it, as is here proposed, from the scholarly, moral, and experimental point of view, with perfect candor and calmness, and with a careful avoidance of prejudices, exaggerations, and declamatory appeals. Demagogues and partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private passion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every extremity, and keep in the golden mean of truth and use.

Such a one is also least likely to secure popular praise. The extreme conclusions, peppery rhetoric, and passionate declamation of the leaders on both sides, who aim at sensation and victory, are surest to awaken the enthusiasm of the extremists, who always direct the admiring gaze of heir parasites to the favorite representatives of their own party, their scorn to the favorite representatives of the other party. But under such circumstances, by is much as the moderation of impartiality and of a patient search for the exact truth is hard to be kept, an unlikely to win popularity, it is the more a duty, and the surer to bear good fruits of service to the public. There is a fashionable habit of laughing or sneering at the illusions of the young, a habit usually mistimed and injurious. For an illusion is as real as a truth. Every phenomenon implies truth, however incorrectly t may be understood. An illusion is, in fact, but a reality misinterpreted. Harmless, joy-breeding illusions are the magic coloring of our existence. They should be cultivated rather than rudely driven away.

The dry critic who daily labors, and with success, to destroy them, may be knowing; but he is not wise. Every seeming acquisition really impoverishes him. The noble Mendelssohn once said, "Life without illusions is only death." The illusions of high and guileless hearts are the blessed hopes created by generous faiths fastening on the better aspects of truth. They are to our experience what the tremulous iridescence is to the neck of the dove. To allow, as we grow old, a sinister gaze at the sterner aspects of truth to banish these rich and kindly illusions, is a wretched folly, however much it may dress itself as wisdom. There are lures and deceits, enchanting at an early period, which, at a later one, ought to be outgrown, seen through and left behind, but not with arid and scoffing conceit. The way to escape sadness, when the light of one beautiful promise after another goes out, is to kindle in place thereof the light of one glorious reality after another. If the gathered experience we carry at evening renders worthless many things we prized in the morning, it should also give preciousness to many things unvalued then.

When the fallen torch of ambition has smouldered into blackness, we ought to make the eternal star of religion our guide. To take spiritual treasures away without replacing them by better ones is robbery. The cynical authors who deal chiefly in ridicule and satire, or in what they call solid facts, the alternate levity and bitterness of whose writings tend to destroy all ingenuous faith and glowing affection, all magnanimous sympathies and hopes, seem to me to be engaged in as miserable a business as those African hunters who train falcons to dart on gazelles, and pick out their beautiful eyes. The illusiveness of life that results from teeming love and trust is as a mist of gold sifted into the atmosphere, through which all the objects of our regard loom, colossal and glittering. As we advance in years, we should indeed learn to recognize, and make allowance for, this refraction and these tints, but without ceasing to enjoy the beautiful aggrandizement they bestow. When there is danger that a character will melt into a mere mush of ungirt feelings, the astringent and bracing use of satire is fit. The application of a fleecing nonchalance or of a jibing scorn to a soul of strong and ardent sentiment, is unfit. A certain divinity should hedge every manifestation of trustful affection, even though it be misjudged. It is for the most part profane to scoff an overstretched or misplaced admiration: it calls rather for a considerate instruction which shall tenderly set it right.

It is insipidity of the feelings that gives rise to sentimentality, as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality, frozen under the cutting breath of derision, resembles that loathsome ice-lake of poison in the Scandinavian hell. Sentimentality, fired by the glorious contagion of self-forgetful admiration and loyalty, is raised into sentiment, or even divinized into enthusiasm. The author will devote his best endeavor to do justice to both sides of the subject treated in his book, taking warning from the partisans who fix an exclusive attention on that aspect of it which they respectively prefer. He will try to set down such true thoughts in such a pure spirit, as, instead of drying up in his readers the springs of generous faith, and disenchanting them of all romantic expectation, will leave them at the end with a higher estimate of the worth of human nature and of the sweetness of human life.

Ever so correct a perception of what we despise and detest leaves our moral rank undetermined; but the measure of what we love and admire is the measure of our own worth. It should never be forgotten, that the most delicate and enduring pleasures we enjoy are those we give. It should always be remembered, that, while the proud demand honor, and the humble seek sympathy, there is a self-respectful affection, neither haughty nor cringing, which will always earn honor, but never stop to ask it, always enjoy sympathy, but never be dependent on it. This whole book is a demonstration of the truth, that, however much woman may need deliverance from some outward trials and disabilities, her grand want is a freer, deeper, richer, holier, inward life. Let her, if she so please, reach out for the ballot, enter on a larger range of work and responsibility. But let her not be blind to the truth, that her foremost, weightiest need is a more thorough intellectual possession and moral fulfilment of herself, leading to a closer union with friends and an absolute surrender to God. The just formula for the aims of woman, as it seems to me, is neither, on the one hand, limitation to domestic life; nor, on the other hand, devotion to public life as an end; but, dedication to the duties and joys of family and social life, and to the nurture of the personal inner life, as the true ends, and a free participation in the grand interests of public life, as a means of purifying the domestic and the inner life from selfish littlenesses, and enriching the experience of the individual with the wide obligations and hopes of humanity at large. Not domestic life alone; not public life alone; not merely domestic life and public life together; but domestic life and public life, for the sake of the personal inner life, purified and aggrandized by the ideal appropriation of the essential experience and progress of the whole world.

This, with such allowances as the distinction of sex really requires, should be the aim of every woman as well as of every man. If this view be correct, it is plain how great and vital an interest it gives to the theme of the present work; the friendship of women; since the very ground and gist of a noble friendship is the cultivation in common of the personal inner lives of those who partake in it, their mutual reflection of souls and joint sharing of experience inciting them to a constant betterment of their being and their happiness.

HAVE WOMEN NO FRIENDSHIPS?

SOME men think women unfitted for friendship. Feminine hearts are so complex, changeable, elusive, that the belief has had great currency among themselves as well as with their critics. In comparing the two sexes in this particular, many persons commit a gross error by overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem on the Characters of Women:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
Most women have no characters at all.

This want of character is held by many thoughtful men for what Coleridge asserted it to be, the perfection of a woman; as tastelessness proves the purity of water; transparency, that of glass. Plausible ground for this view is furnished by the fact, that the perfection of fine and noble manners the peculiar province of feminine genius consists in the absence of egotism, in that chaste and lustrous exuberance of sympathetic joy which results from the opposite of all personal domination; namely, spontaneous obedience to the whole law of duty. Nevertheless, the opinion is unsound; partly untrue, partly inadequate. It results from the despotic selfhood of man, who wishes not to reflect another, but only to be reflected. The absence of fixed individuality makes one a readier mirror; and man, as the historic master, desires the woman who confronts him to be, at least apparently, the yielding subject of his will. But since woman is an independent being, endowed with a separate responsibleness, she has a distinct personal destiny to fulfil as much as he has, and should be granted an equal freedom of individuality.

The perfection of a woman in the sight of God is one thing: her irresistible charmingness to selfish man may be quite another thing. If the latter requires a soft compliance, involving the absence of will, the former is not irreconcilable with the firmest constancy of individual traits; and, in fact, women can no more be lumped together in level community, either by positives or by negatives, than men can be. Those differ from each other as widely as these do. Accuracy of thought has seldom been more recklessly offered up to pungency of expression than in the above-cited aphorism of Pope. There is an ample variety of tenacious womanly characters between the extremes marked by Miriam beating her timbrels, and Cleopatra applying the asp; Cornelia showing her Roman jewels, and Guyon rapt in God; Lucrezia Borgia raging with bowl and dagger, and Florence Nightingale sweetening the memory of the Crimean war with philanthropic deeds. What group of men indeed can be brought together, more distinct in individuality, more contrasted in diversity of traits and destiny, than such women as Eve in the Garden of Eden, Mary at the foot of the cross, Rebecca by the well, Semiramis on her throne, Ruth among the corn, Jezebel in her chariot, Lais at a banquet, Joan of Arc in battle, Tomyris striding over the field with the head of Cyrus in a bag of blood, Perpetua smiling on the lions in the amphitheatre, Martha cumbered with much service, Pocahontas under the shadow of the woods, Saint Theresa in the convent, Madame Roland on the scaffold, Mother Agnes at Port Royal, exiled De Staël wielding her pen as a sceptre, and Mrs. Fry lavishing her existence on outcasts!

In searching for the friendships of women, it is difficult at first to find striking examples. Their lives are so private, their dispositions are so modest, their experiences have been so little noticed by history, that the annals of the feminine heart are for the most part a secret chapter. But a sufficiently patient search will cause a beautiful multitude of such instances to reveal themselves. Nothing, perhaps, will strike the literary investigator of the subject more forcibly than the frequency with which he meets the expressed opinion, that women really have few or no friendships; that with them it must be either love, hate, or nothing. A writer in one of our popular periodicals has recently ventured this dogmatic assertion: "If the female mind were not happily impervious to logic, we might demonstrate, even to its satisfaction, that the history of the sex presents no single instance of a famous friendship." Before we get through our work, we shall meet with abundant confutations of this rash and uncomplimentary statement.

Swift says, "To speak the truth, I never yet knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex." The statement, if taken with too wide a meaning, might have been refuted by the sight, under his eyes, of the cordial and life-long affection of Miss Johnson and Lady Gifford, the sister of Sir William Temple. He could not expect a Stella and a Vanessa to be friends: an exclusive love for a common object inevitably made them deadly rivals. But the author of "Gulliver's Travels" was a keen observer; his maxims have always a basis in fact; and it is undoubtedly true that women of exceptional cleverness prefer the wit, wisdom, and earnestness of the more cultivated members of the other sex to the too frequent ignorance and triviality of their own. Undoubtedly, in most societies, women of unusual genius and accomplishments can more easily find congenial companionship with men than with women. But to infer from this any natural incompatibility for friendships between women is to draw a monstrous inference, wholly unwarranted by the premises. In the sensible chapter of "A Woman's Thoughts about Women," which Miss Muloch devotes to this subject, she says, "The friendships of women are much more common than those of men; but rarely or never so firm, so just, or so enduring." But then she proceeds, justly, though with a little inconsistency, to say, "With women these relations may be sentimental, foolish, and fickle; but they are honest, free from secondary motives of interest, and infinitely more respectable than the time-serving, place-hunting, dinner-seeking devotion which Messrs. Tape and Tadpole choose to denominate friendship." That the sharper and sincerer feelings of women make them more capable than men of sacrificing their interests to their passions, less likely to sacrifice their passions to their interests, and that they are more absorbed by their sympathies and antipathies, admits of no question.

Eugénie de Guérin, a woman of the rarest heart and soul, wrote in her journal, a few years ago, this passage, which has already grown famous: "I have ever sought a friendship so strong and earnest that only death could break it; a happiness and unhappiness which I had, alas! in my brother Maurice. No woman has been, or will be, able to replace him; not even the most distinguished has been able to give me that bond of intelligence and of tastes, that broad, simple, and lasting relation. There is nothing fixed, enduring, vital, in the feelings of women; their attachments to each other are so many pretty bows of ribbons. I notice these light affections in all female friends. Can we not, then, love each other differently? I neither know an example in history nor am acquainted with one in the present. Orestes and Pylades have no sisters. It makes me impatient, when I think of it, that you men have something in your hearts which is wanting to us. In return we have devotedness." It is striking to notice the identity of sentiment here with that in the maxim of La Bruyere: "In love women exceed the generality of men, but in friendship we have infinitely the advantage."

With reference to the statement that "Orestes and Pylades have no sisters," besides the superfluous disproofs of it contained in the pages that follow, it is an interesting fact that classic literature affords one example, which modern writers have never, to my knowledge, noticed. Pausanias, in his "Description of Greece," tenth book, twenty-ninth chapter, gives an recount of an elaborate painting by Polygnotus of the underworld, the scenery and fate of the dead in the future state. Among the images of the departed set forth on the canvas were two women, Chloris and rhyia, locked in a fond embrace. Of these two women, thus shown eternally united in the realm beyond he grave, Pausanias says that they were a pair of friends extraordinarily attached to each other in life. Their story is lost. The imagination of womankind might compensate for the missing narrative, and make the names of Chloris and Thyia live with the lames of Damon and Pythias.

Let us sift the grounds of the opinion that women ire relatively incapable of friendship, analyze the appearances on which it rests, and separate the truth in it from the error.

The first fact of the subject is, that women are naturally less selfish and more sympathetic than men.

They have more affection to bestow, greater need of sympathy, and therefore are more sure, in the absence of love, to seek friendship. The devastating egotism of man is properly foreign to woman; though there are many women as haughty, hard, and imperious as any man. But these are unfeminine, despite their sex. There are women who seem cold and beautiful stones, their hearts icicles, their tears frozen gems pressed out by injured pride. On the other hand, there are men as soft, as modest, as celestially sympathetic, as almost any woman. Still, the cardinal contrast holds, that women are self-forgetful, men self-asserting; women hide their surplus affection under a feigned indifference; men hide their indifference under a feigned affection. Of course, in this comparison, depraved women are excluded: these are generally far more heartless and calculating than men. The aphorism of Rochefoucauld "In their first passion, women love the lover; in their subsequent ones, they love love" is descriptive, not of women, but of that class of women who cherish a succession of lovers, a class familiar to the base and brilliant French aphorist. With such, the venal commonness of affection first profanes, then destroys it.

It is a pathetic sign of the diviner nature of women, that they conceal sorrow more easily than joy, while men conceal joy more easily than sorrow. The lover of Adelaide de Comminge having joined a convent of Trappists, she followed him thither, disguised as a man, took the vows, and was not recognized by him until on her death-bed. Man is not capable of such pure devotion: only a woman could thus forbear, and be content with the secret joy of the beloved presence. Man demands action: woman demands emotion. Friendship between two youths is martial, adventurous, a trumpet-blast or a bugle-air: friendship between two girls is poetic, contemplative, the sigh of a harp-string or the swell of an organ-pipe.

Woman needs friendship more than man, because she is less self- sufficing. She is much more apt than he to think the form in the mirror is lovely, but not to think it of herself. Milton's Eve was startled with a shy delight at the fair shape in the fountain, never dreaming that it was herself. Men are flutes: they must be filled with the warm breath of a foreign sympathy. Women are harpsichords: they have all the conditions of music in themselves, and only need to be struck. But, containing so much, their need of being struck is the greater. Charlotte Bronte, in her sad, weary life, full, as she expressed it, of loneliness, of longing for companionship, had two faithful and precious friends; her "dear, dear E.," and her "good, kind Miss W." To the former she writes, "I am at this moment trembling all over with excitement, after reading your note: it is what I never received before, the unrestrained pouring out of a warm, gentle, generous heart. If you love me, do, do, do come on Friday. I shall watch and wait for you; and, if you disappoint me, I shall weep." Few sayings are more touching than that which Thackeray heard a woman utter, that she would gladly have taken Swift's cruelty to have had his tenderness. Now, is it not true that the intenser need naturally implies the keener search and the more copious finding?

The great reason why the friendships of women are not more frequent and prominent than they are is, that the proper destiny of woman calls her to love; and this sentiment, in its fullness, is usually too absorbing to leave room and force for conspicuous friendships. With men the other sentiments are not so much suspended or engulfed by conjugal and parental love. "The men," La Bruyere says, "are the occasion that women do not love each other." With the one-sided exaggeration incident to most aphorisms, this is true. Husband and children occupy the wife and mother; and marriage is often the grave of feminine friendships. According to the maxim of Saint Paul, "The head of the woman is the man:" the attraction of another woman must generally be weaker. The lives of men are the sighs of nature: the lives of women are their echoes. The sharp-eyed Richter says, "A woman, unlike Narcissus, seeks not her own image and a second I: she much prefers a not-I." This profound remark exactly touches the difference between friendship and love, and between the respective relations of man and woman to the two sentiments. Friendship is the simple reflection of souls by each other. Love is the mutual reflection of their entire being by two persons, each supplementing the defects of the other. Love, therefore, is friendship, with a differential addition. True love includes friendship, as the greater includes the smaller. Now, the self-sufficient character of man makes him seek a second I; that is, wish to see himself reflected in another. But the sympathetic character of woman makes her seek a not- I; that is, wish to see another reflected in herself. It is incorrect to say, that woman has less capacity than man for friendship: it is correct only to say, that man is more easily satisfied with friendship than woman is. She demands that, and something more; and every page of history teems with the records of that something more, the heavenly records of the sufferings, sacrifices, and triumphs of woman's love. When this imperial sentiment is baffled, and yet the soul remains mistress of herself, it is impossible that the next strongest sentiment should not, in all available instances, be cultivated as a solace and vicegerent. One of the renowned apothegms of that sinister moralist, Rochefoucauld, is, "Women feel friendship insipid after love." But he should have limited his remark to vicious women. It will not apply to virtuous women. Jane Austin, who in knowledge of the feminine heart has few equals, says, "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."

Women are more sensitive and acute than men, more delicate electrometers for all the imponderable agencies of sympathy; and this greater penetration makes them more fastidious, gives them better ability indeed to admire what is superior, but causes them to be less tolerant of what is offensive. The innervation and nutrition of woman are finer and more complicated than those of man; and, by as much as her nerves are more numerous and more delicate, she has a keener and richer consciousness, including many states he is incapable of reproducing. He is more of a head; she, more of a plant. Her body is far more intelligent than his; and feelings are the thoughts of the body, as thoughts are the feelings of the mind. No one can forget the lines, made so famous by their exquisite felicity, written of Elizabeth Drury by Donne:

The pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
Ye might have almost said her body thought.

Mothers feel as if still connected with their offspring by the fibres that joined them in their prenatal life; as the nerves continue to report in consciousness an amputated hand or foot. There is in all their emotions a vascular quality or consanguineous tincture never to be wholly eliminated.

The greater material identification of mothers than of fathers with their children, in the long period of gestation and nursing, leads to a closer and more persistent mental identification with them. The physical differences of the sexes react on the mind to make moral differences; and these are further heightened by differences in their education, habits of life, and sphere of interests. No doubt, these differences occupy a larger share of attention in women than in men.

Those who have suffered sharply, see keenly; and it is difficult to conceal much from women. They have the strangest facility in reading physiological language, tones, gestures, bearing, and all those countless signs which make the face and eyes such tell-tales of the soul. They will look into your eyes, and see you think; listen to your voice, and hear you feel. The coy and subtle world of emotion now infinitely timid and reticent, now all gates flung down for the floods to pour is their domain. They are at home in it all, from the rosy fogs of feeling to the twilight borders of intelligence. On the one side, these endowments are a help to friendship. The ardor with which a pure and generous woman enters into choice states of soul in another is a redemptive sight. This capacity of swift perception and sympathy makes the friendship of a woman a precious boon to a man who aims at greatness or perfection; and scarcely ever has there been an illustrious man who has not been appreciated, comforted, and inspired in secret by some woman long before he became famous, circling around him with her unselfish ministrations, like that star which is the invisible companion of Sirius.

The poor young Niebuhr writes home from Great Britain to Madam Hensler, the wife of the good professor who had befriended him in college, "Your letter has made me so wild with delight, that I have felt full of affection to every creature that has come in my way." The melancholy heart and dismal lot of Gerald Griffin, the Irish novelist, found almost their solitary human alleviation and brightness in the sustaining kindness and admiration of a lady, designated in his brother's biography of him as Mrs. L. John Foster, whose social career was as trying to him as his massive soul was lonely, exceedingly enjoyed the cordial encouragement and affection of a number of cultivated and excellent women. Many of his published letters were addressed to one of these, Mrs. Mant. He thus writes to her of another one: "I turn, disgusted and contemptuous, from insipid and shallow folly, to lave in the tide of deeper sentiments. There I swim and dive and rise and gambol, with all that wild delight which could be felt by a fish, after panting out of its element awhile, when flung into its own world of waters by some friendly hand. Such a hand to me is Mrs. C.'s. It is impossible to give a just idea of the strange fascination she diffuses around her. My mind seems to be larger, stronger, and more brilliant in her company than anywhere else. Every fountain of sentiment opens at her approach."

The greater sensibility, insight, and impulsiveness of women, on the other hand, expose them more to obstacles in the way of friendship. Coldness and meanness are less endurable by them. A genuinely feeling soul has an insuperable repugnance alike for unfeelingness, for false feeling, and for false expressions of feeling. An Arabian courser cannot travel comfortably with a snail. A soul whose motions are musical curves cannot well blend with a soul whose motions are discordant angles. A woman is naturally as much more capricious than a man, as she is more susceptible. A slighter shock suffices to jostle her delicate emotions out of delight into disgust. She is therefore a severer personal critic. Male peccadilloes are female crimes. A wet-blanket presence that she could not tolerate may refresh him. As less strong, less stably poised, than he, she is more tempted to have recourse to artifice; and when she does stoop to dissimulation, she uses it with inimitable dexterity, as shield, as foil, as poniard. It would be a difficult task for men to do what the spotless and loving Eugénie de Guérin was horrified at seeing two prominent Parisian ladies do, play the part of tender friends in society, and then turn away and venomously caricature each other. What woman who possessed a ring conferring invisibility on its wearer, would dare to put it on, and move about among her friends? The weakness of women is an exaggerated attention to trifles. The great condition of steady friendship is community of plans and ends in the parties. This is much wanting in women, who think chiefly of persons, little of laborious aims. Two girls, who live in a multitude of evaporating impulses and dreams it were as easy to yoke a couple of humming-birds, and make them draw. Because the polarity of a grand fixed purpose is absent from it, the mind of many a woman is a heap of petty antipathies; and, where the likings are fickle, the dislikings are pretty sure to be tenacious. A keen student of human nature has remarked, that many women "spend force enough in trivial observations on dress and manners, to form a javelin to pierce quite through a character." Women's eyes are armed with microscopes to see all the little defects and dissimilarities which can irritate and injure their friendships. Hence there are so many feminine friends easily provoked to mutual criticisms and recriminations.

The dear friends, Fanny Squeers and Matilda Price, experienced a violent jealousy on account of Nicholas Nickleby. After a fierce altercation, they fell into tears, followed by remonstrances and an explanation, and terminated by embraces and by vows of eternal friendship; "the occasion making the fifty-second time of repeating the same impressive ceremony within a twelvemonth." But obviously it is a closer approach to the truth to take the sensitiveness and interruptions in the mutual relations of women, as compared with those in the relations of men, as the direct, rather than as the inverse, measure of the number and value of their respective friendships. Yet, by a gross error, the estimate is usually made in the latter way.

The maxim of Walter Savage Landor is a palpable stroke at the truth: "No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman." In fact, there is immensely less indifference between women than between men; there are incomparably more enmities; and there are a great many more friendships. It is the enormous preponderance of the mutual dislikes of women over those of men, which chiefly has given rise to the fallacious belief that their mutual likes are less. These, too, are more, though not, perhaps, so much more.

Among women, it is true, only a few of those memorable unions of soul and life are known which entitle the parties to be ranked as pairs of friends. Our ignorance, however, of such cases does not prove their non-existence. There have been thousands of them. There are a great many at this moment. It is the characteristic modesty and privacy of the lives of women which keep these heart-histories concealed. The most gifted, refined, and elevated natures are most likely to have this experience; and such natures shrink with unconquerable repugnance from all obtrusion, or betrayal, of their inmost experiences. The lives of noble women are "so transparent and so deep that only the subtle insight of sympathy can penetrate them:" their open secrets baffle all the scrutiny of coarse souls. The choicest of her sex will, to some extent, agree with the energetic sentiment of Eugénie de Guérin "I detest those women who mount the pulpit, and lay their passions bare." Engrossing, then, as the attachment of two women may be, it is not often thrust into public view so as to obtain the literary recognition won by the similar attachments of men who act their parts in the front of society, seeking a place in history for their achievements. As far as the public are concerned, women merge their heart-lives in the careers of those dear to them. It is accordingly in exceptional cases alone that a knowledge of the friendships of women is preserved for posterity. This, indeed, holds likewise of men, but in a much lower degree. Thus far there have been printed accounts of the lives of hundreds of men where there has been a printed account of the life of one woman. Allowance should be made for this in our estimate of their comparative friendships.

And now has not something been said to shake the current opinion, that the friendships of women are few and superficial? It is true that women are more imperiously called to love than men are; are more likely to be absorbed by this master-passion, and thus are more exposed to jealousy of each other. It is true, that, owing to their greater sensitiveness, keener subjection to the fastidious sway of taste, women are more apt than men to fall out, being more easily disturbed and estranged by trifles; but this relative subjection to trifles is chiefly a consequence of the exclusion of woman hitherto from the grandest fields of education, the noblest subjects of interest and action. It is true, that the attachments of women, on account of the greater privacy of their lives, are less conspicuous than those of men, less frequently obtain historic or literary mention, and therefore seem to be rarer. But it is not true, either that women are incapable of enthusiastic and steadfast friendships for each other, or that such friendships are uncommon. If women are more critical and severe towards their own sex than men are, it is chiefly because they cannot, like men, be indifferent to each other: they must positively feel either sympathy or aversion.

It is very frequently the case, that a single woman, blessed with wealth, invites some friend, to whom she is strongly attached, to accept a home with her; and they live thenceforth in indissoluble union. Such an instance among men is almost as rare as a white blackbird. Unmarried sisters so often pass all their years together, inseparably united, both inwardly and outwardly, that almost every one of us is acquainted with many examples. But it is extremely rare for bachelor brothers to club together, and pass a wholly shared existence.

In the higher classes of society, it is a common custom for nobly- born women to have lady companions, to whom they give a home and support and constant love, for the sake of congenial intercourse with them, for the comfort of their presence and conversation. There is scarcely a corresponding custom among men. It has happened to the writer to know numerous instances in which a wealthy woman has, in her lifetime, freely bestowed on a poor friend, from a pure impulse of good-will, a sum of money sufficient to secure her a handsome independence. This substantial deed of friendship he has not known paralleled in a single instance among men.

Men do not often go so far in either moral extreme as the other sex. It is the corruption of the best that makes the worst. Who is this, shameless mixture of beast and fiend, with body of fire, heart of marble, brow of bronze, and hand hollowed to hold money? It is the woman who sells herself in the street. And who is this, with upturned eyes of fathomless love, the radiant paleness of ecstasy transfusing her countenance, heaven flooding her soul, the world a forgotten toy beneath her feet? It is the woman who, in silence and secrecy, gives herself to God. So capacious of extremes is the feminine spirit.

There is no fretfullness, spitefullness, revengefullness, equal to those of a woman. There is no grace, sweetness, dignity, disinterestedness, equal to those of a woman. And, when all is said, the conclusion of one who understands the subject will be, that, for quick depth of sympathy, intuitive divination, joyous sacrifice, perfect reproduction of all the modulations of feeling, there is no friendship equal to that of a woman.

FRIENDSHIP WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE TIES OF CONSANGUINITY.

THE presentation of the friendships of women in distinct classes will add clearness to the treatment, and will also make it easier to suggest, with some approach to adequacy, the wealth of the topic. It is natural to begin with instances within the limits of blood relationship, and between persons of opposite sex. The relations of conscious affection among those of near kindred are but too apt, from the blunting influence of custom, to have a character of tameness, lukewarm routine. The members of the family, in their commonplace familiarity, cherish a quiet goodwill and fidelity, without any relishing surprise, romantic hues, or mystery. Calmly affectionate, or perhaps listless, towards all within the domestic circle, they look outside for inspiring intercourse and thrilling attachments, and for calls to lofty sacrifice and delight. This is too often the case. Identity of inheritance and situation, sameness of idiosyncrasy, and habitude of union, squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in numerous instances it is not so. The confidential intimacies, the incessant dependencies, duties, and favors of near relatives, instead of engendering a consciousness of vapid usage, sprinkle electric stimulants on their mutual feelings and intercommunications.

Their affictions towards each other keep fresh and grow deeper, and the homestead stands in a landscape tinged with faith and romance. The imagination, undeadened by custom, goes with their eyes and hands, exerts its beautifying magic, and idealizes or glorifies their images in each other's souls.

Then kinship becomes friendship. Upon the material consanguinity is superinduced a spiritual consanguinity; the legal and customary bonds of descent, association, and duty are brightened and exalted into delightful relations of intelligence and sympathy, a choice community of character, purposes, and experience. The relative is then hidden in the friend. Innumerable aunts and nephews, nieces and uncles, cousins, and other branches of kindred, have found in their relationship, with the common interests and the consequent meetings, a fortunate occasion for forming close and blessed friendships.

The biblical instance of Esther and Mordecai is very charming. Esther, left an orphan, was adopted and brought up by her uncle, Mordeoi. When the beautiful Jewish maiden was taken into the palace, among those from whom Ahasuerus was to choose his queen, "Mordecai walked every day before the court of the women's house, to know how Esther did and what should become of her." And when she had been made queen, "she did still the commandment of Mordecai, like as when she was brought up with him." In the threatened calamity of the Jews, Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and wept. Esther's maids told her of it. "Then was the queen exceedingly grieved; and she sent raiment to clothe Mordecai." In all the sequel of the well-known tale, it is easy to see that the niece's friendship for her uncle was at least as important a sentiment as the wife's love for her husband. Beranger caused to be placed on the tomb of his aunt this touching inscription: She was never a mother, yet sons mourned for her. It is a striking fact that the strength of the tie of blood is in an historic process of decrease, while, parallel with it, the strength of the tie of moral sympathy is in an historic process of increase. In primitive ages, when barbaric force prevailed, and life was full of exposures, and redress was uncertain, the family was the unit of society. All within the bond of the family stood compactly together in the most sacred and intense of leagues against every hostile approach from without. But as law and order became consolidated, and their sanctions diffused, and adequate general tribunals were set up, and public considerations encroached on private, the tie of physical kindred grew less, that of moral fellowship more. The bloody feuds of old times, which ran down the veins of successive generations like streams of fire, have become nearly obsolete. The hates transmitted with such wild ferocity, the friendships handed down with such burning loyalty, among the ancient Scottish clans, are phenomena not possible in the cultured circles of Berlin, London, Paris, or New York. This relative decay of the energy of the sentiment of material relationship is not to be regretted; for it is a sign of progress, when we see its connection with the corresponding development of the force of free spiritual affinity. It looks towards the end contemplated by Jesus when he said. "Whosoever doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my mother, and my brother, and my sister."

Once the merit or demerit of the individual had comparatively little to do with the regards which the other members of the family cherished towards him. Now it goes far towards a total determination of those regards. Multitudes of the nearest relatives are utterly indifferent to each other; multitudes of them hate each other. Where no fitness for a genuine union of mind and heart exists in the parties, all the forensic ties and all the conjoining memories in the world go for nothing. A horrid illustration of this truth is given by the conduct of Tullia, the Lady Macbeth of antiquity, who drove her chariot over the body of her murdered father lying in the "Wicked Street," and smiled as his blood spattered her dress. But truly it is a happy thing when those naturally associated in birth, position, and circumstances of life, become by sympathy inwardly united in mutual appreciation and will. It is like adding the spirit of music to the material conditions of music.

FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN.

PARENTS and children furnish the first class of examples in which the fondness of a close attachment by nature is elevated into a freer and more comprehensive connection by intelligent sympathy; in which the affection of instinct and custom is transformed into the loftier and richer affection of friendship. This high and benign transformation takes place in due season between all mothers and sons, all daughters and fathers, who afford the requisite conditions for it; that is, in all cases where they remain long enough together, and their characters and manners are such as naturally command respect and love from each other. Even when children are ignoble and unworthy, their fathers and mothers may yearn over them with every strictly parental affection; and even when parents are vicious and degraded, their children may regard them with every strictly filial affection; but friendship between them is generally impossible without the co-existence, on both sides, of intrinsic worth, of those responsive virtues which elicit esteem and dominate sympathy. The great reason of the failure of a broad, glowing friendship between parents and children a failure o deplorably common in our homes is the lack, in heir characters, of that wealth, nobleness, sweetness, patience, aspiration, which would irresistibly draw them to each other in mutual honor, love, and joy. The only remedy for this unhappy failure is the cure of its unhappier cause. Whatever makes characters deep, rich, pure, and gentle in themselves, tends to make them pleasing to each other.

It is absurd to suppose, that mean, hateful, and miserable souls will love each other simply because they are connected by ties of consanguinity, of interest, or of duty.

Whatever makes us suffer, especially whatever injures our finer emotions, naturally tends to become repulsive to us, an object of dislike gathering disagreeable associations. Even a mother, a son, a father, a daughter, may become such an object, as is illustrated with melancholy frequency. But when parents and children possess those high qualities of soul which naturally give pleasure, create affection, and evoke homage; and when they are not too early separated, or too much distracted in alien pursuits, a firm and ardent friendship must spring up between them. The mere parental and filial relation will become subordinated, as a sober central thread in a wide web of colored embroidery. The parental instinct and the filial instinct, weaned from their organic directness, will grow more complex and mental; and, parallel with this process, the gracious guardians and the clinging dependants will gradually change into companions and friends, still retaining, however, sacred vestiges and memories of the original cords of their union. When we have allowed proper abatement for the thousands of instances in which this precious result is not reached, the general statement now made opens to us a large class of beautiful friendships. In all ages there have been myriads of mothers and sons, myriads of daughters and fathers, who were models of devoted, happy friends. Before paying attention to these, it will be profitable for us to notice the other cases.

Considered with reference to our subject, there are four classes of parents and children. First, Those who are positive enemies, their main relation being one of opposition, dislike, and pain. Undoubtedly a chief reason for this unfortunate result is carelessness, failure to understand and feel in advance the inestimable importance of a right rule and fruition of the home. But a cause working more strongly still arises from prominent vices of character, base and wicked qualities of soul, which make harmony impossible, friction and alienation inevitable. Disorder, fretfullness, antagonism, and misery, pervading the house, compel its members to detest each other. Then hatred occupies the place which should be occupied by friendship. This is a melancholy and odious sight to see. It is a horrible evil for its sufferers to endure. It is a terrible misfortune and wretchedness to all concerned.

Secondly, There are parents and children who live in entire unconcern and neglect of each other, in a mere routine of external connections and associations. This absence of all deep personal sensibility, either sympathetic or hostile, is not so frightful a calamity as the rankling resentment of a rooted and conscious enmity; but it is a lamentable misfortune. It is a sad loss, however little they may think of it. Absorbed in other matters, giving all their affection to business, fashion, ambition, dissipation, or to persons outside of the home-circle, they overlook the thing most indispensable for placid and permanent contentment; and are sure, sooner or later, to rue their folly, in an experience of bitter disappointment.

Thirdly, there are those who, so far from cherishing hatred or indifference, deeply love each other, and passionately long to enjoy an intimate union in reciprocal confidence, esteem, and sympathy, but are prevented by some unhappy impediment, some disastrous misunderstanding or morbid pique. Many a parent yearns with unspeakable fondness towards a disobedient and ungrateful child; the heart breaking with agony for the reconciliation, the embrace, the sweet communion fate withholds. Many a child profoundly desires to fall at the feet of a cold, hard, careless parent, and with supplicating tears win the notice, the affection, that would be so priceless; and, sadder still, there is many an instance where both parent and child are truly noble and affectionate, and would give the world if they could break through the separating barrier, and lavish their whole hearts on each other; but, in spite of these generous qualities, their common desires and their bitter suffering, some falsehood, some pride, some shyness, some suspicion, some chill, intangible phantom, is set fatally between them. In every community there are piteous tragedies of this sort, little dreamed of by those outside, but which the bleeding hearts concerned in them feel as a deadly drain, hastening them towards the grave.

Fourthly, Besides the parents and children who are open enemies, who are utter indifferentists, or who, while loving each other, are kept apart by some obstacle, there is another class, who, as free and cordial friends, happily realize in their relation all that is to be desired. In these examples there are ample wisdom, considerateness, tender sympathy, and guardian strength, on the one side; ready docility, attentiveness, obedience, reverence, and fondness, on the other; with an exuberance of indescribable comfort and peace on both sides. What a treasure, what an inestimable boon, what a divine trust, what an inexhaustible delight, is such an affection between a parent and a child! What a paradise any country would be, if such an experience were welling up, a pure fountain of life, in every home throughout its borders!

Few inquiries can have greater interest or importance than the inquiry, why there is not more generally between parents and children that warm, ingenuous, abiding affection which produces a full and joyous friendship. A clear perception and statement of the difficulties in the way of it may suggest the means of removing them. And, in the outset, is it not obvious that the home affections flourish so scantily because scanty attention is paid to the cultivation of them? It is forever the fallacy and folly of man to think least of that which lies nearest to him, and is the most indissolubly bound up with his being as a cause of happiness or of misery. He thinks most eagerly on those comparatively exceptional and remote things, which, in consequence of their greatness or their rarity, are the strangest and the most impressive to him. He ought to pay the keenest heed to that which is the most important in its influence on his life, not to that which is the most startling to his fancy. Now, it is unquestionably true, that while there is nothing which contributes so much to enrich or to impoverish us, to bless or to curse us, as our domestic relations, there is scarcely any thing which we take less pains to cultivate into all that it is capable of becoming. In most instances, the life of the home is so close to us, so identified with ourselves, accepted with such a matter of course security, that we overlook the delicate conditions for preserving its freshness and securing its increase. But, in every relation of persons, there are two sets of conditions, corresponding with the two sides, neither of which can be neglected with impunity. There are a multitude of homes which are centres of irritation and wretchedness, miniature hells to their occupants.

The first thing to be done is to turn thought to the subject, break up the apathy of routine, secure an earnest appreciation of the facts in the case, and then study the remedy.

One great obstacle to the desired friendships of parents and children consists in the difficulty of a perfect sympathy between persons marked by such differences of age, position, interest, and experience. Those of the same years, passions, pleasures, duties, will naturally sympathize the most easily. But in all these respects the disparities of parent and child are equally numerous and striking.

They look at things from opposed points of view; they judge of subjects in the light respectively of experience and of inexperience. This great and constant contrast must give rise to innumerable discrepancies of opinion and of desire, provocative of disagreements, if not of dislikes. Nature has, however, provided powerful neutralizers for this obstacle to sympathy between those who are so widely unlike, counteractives which forcibly tend to prevent disagreements from breeding hostilities. These counteractives are the profound instincts of parental fondness and filial reverence, the first of which tends to make the parents enter into the spiritual states of their children, and to look at things from their point of view; and the second, to make the children, with docile duteousness, adopt as their own the conclusions of their parents. These counteractives ought to be carefully fostered, neither party forgetting the differences between himself and the other, but endeavoring to bridge those differences by the identifying powers of imagination and sympathy. Another frequent destroyer or lessener of the natural love of parents and children is the conflict between the rightful authority of the former and the wilful impulses of the latter.

Maturity, having accumulated knowledge and wisdom out of long experience, and being set by God and nature in charge over the headstrong instincts of ignorant or capricious youth, cannot avoid the duty of frequently applying the curb to excessive desires, and the spur to defective ones. A sense of chafing, an impulse to resent and rebel, will naturally often arise. And, in every such collision of passion and rule, there is a tendency to hostility. It is needless to say how lamentably frequent are the examples in which this tendency makes actual foes of those between whom the natural bonds of love and reverence are of the most sacred character. It is evident that parental authority is a divine trust which must be exercised over childhood and youth. Only it should be exercised on principle, not from caprice; for the good of the ruled, not for the gratification of a despotic self-assertion in the ruler; with fond gentleness, not with harshness or cruelty. And the authority of the parent should be vindicated as far as possible by force of wisdom, weight of character, power of persuasion; avoiding, as far as can properly be done, every occasion of conflict, every need of a violent issue. The child, on the other hand, ought to remember the rightful authority of his parents, consider their greater experience, take for granted their benignant intention, cultivate a grateful sense of dependence and duty towards them, and foster the habit of prompt and hearty submission to their wishes. It is a safe rule, in general, for a boy or girl to respect and obey the father and mother, and not to think, when they oppose the thoughtless spirit of self-indulgence, that this parental opposition is unreasonable or unkind. To honor one's parents is the first scriptural commandment with promise.

It is a habit which no one will ever regret. But, alas! how many a man, how many a woman, has kneeled on the grave where father or mother lay mouldering, and has lamented, with burning tears of shame and sorrow, the disobedience, the disrespect, the unkindness, the neglect, shown in earlier years! How have they longed to lift up the faded forms from their coffins, to re-animate them, and to have them again in their homes, that, by unwearied ministrations of tenderness, they might atone for the upbraiding past! Let the man in the full maturity of his age, hardened by long contact with the world, revisit the scenes of his childhood. Let him stand by the old homestead where fence and wall have fallen, and house and hearth gone to dust. What presence hallows the place? Who so fills the air about him as to seem just ready to break into palpable vision wherever he turns? It is his mother. Overwhelmed by a flood of memories, inspired by an immortal faith, not less than by an immortal affection, he drops on his knees, and cries,

Mother! thou art mother still;
Only the body dies;
Such love as bound thy heart to mine,
Death only purifies.

The same moral is drawn by Sarah Tytler in her excellent book of "Sweet Counsel" for girls, where she says, "I do not know that I ever told my father I was once or twice very angry with him for refusing me this or that request. My lips will never tell him now, and beg his pardon, and assure him that I was not worthy of him then, but that I know all at last; my hand will never clasp his hand, my lips never kiss his lips again. But I do not break my heart; for I think he knows all that I ever intended to tell him, and has forgiven me long ago. I am persuaded,

"There must be wisdom with great death;
The dead shall look me through and through."

But perhaps the most fatal influence against the growth and perpetuation of vivid friendships between parents and children is the disenchanting effect of familiarity. A close and constant intercourse, long continued, usually tends to make persons arid, commonplace, uninteresting, to each other, takes away surprise, eager expectation, and romance. There is nothing human beings so much like as to be able strongly to impress and be impressed. This seems to cease to be possible in a company who fancy they have struck every string, sounded every secret, exhausted the possibilities, in each other. A long subjection of the same persons to the same circumstances produces a general spirit of sameness, a flagging tedium, a want of varied attraction and stimulation. Let a stranger, a foreign friend, any honored guest, come in, and how his presence quickens every thing! Life shines with novel lustre, and throbs with new energy. Every one puts his best foot forward, exerts his best powers to interest. The fresh pleasure every one feels gives him a fresh power of pleasing. But, ah it would be of no use, we think, to make any effort in the dull old circle of our familiars, who can produce no effect on us, and on whom we, in turn, can produce no effect. And thus life in the home becomes monotonous, torpid, and vacant. Worlds of love are every day destroyed by indifference and repulse. If the same pains were taken to invigorate and perpetuate the domestic affections as to secure the good-will of other persons whom we admire or depend on, it could scarcely fail to give a wonderful enrichment to the satisfactions of home.

This truth is especially applicable to the relation of parents and children in our day. The old extreme of a severe exercise of parental authority has passed away, and a new extreme of filial insubordination and insolent self-assertion has taken its place. It is altogether too frequent a thing now to see lads and lasses taking their parents to task as inferiors, and demanding every service from them. The thought of his child should be a constant delight to a parent. When the ill-temper and ill-behavior of a child cause every association with him in the heart of the parent to be disturbing and painful, how can the result be otherwise than alienating and depressing? Let there be two children in a family, one of whom is invariably obedient, gentle, attentive, ingenuous; the other, irritable, insubordinate, careless, secretive, and untruthful. The former shall be idolized, while the latter is regarded with condemnatory repugnance. The fact that a boy is your son, or that a girl is your daughter, cannot wholly neutralize the repulsiveness of their odious traits. When children uniformly respect and obey their parents, and seek by every kind attention and praiseworthy effort to please them, it is not in human nature that they should fail to be unspeakably loved and caressed. Deferential treatment, patient service, quick sympathy, expectant attention, an obvious desire to please, are the most potent charms that mortals can wield. They show that the parties are important to each other. They give life its highest value. In their absence, all romantic color fades, and every precious affection expires. The most effective intercourse that vanity can establish with strangers offers nothing comparable to the delicious quality of the experience which results when a parent and child, of suitable character and age, are blessed with a complete friendship. Every thought of it pours for them a sudden sunshine through the sky, an exhilarating fragrance through the air.

Undoubtedly the affections are greatly hurt and repressed by being regarded as obligations rather than as privileges. They must be wooed forth by the gentlest lures. They will not come when carelessly expected and demanded as a matter of course. The heart will be free. It imperiously resents bonds and orders. The love of parent and child is certainly even more a delight than it is a duty. They should be friends, not so much because they are commanded to be such, but more because they are mutually worthy, and because their peace of mind, their contentment of heart, their improvement and happiness, depend on their being such. What privilege can be imagined superior in purity of joy and profit, to that of a young man who has for his friend a wise and holy mother, whom he loves with enthusiasm and confides in with an absolute devotion?

And if there be a human tear
From passion's dross refined and clear,
A tear so limpid and so meek
It would not stain an angel's cheek,
'Tis that which pious fathers shed
Upon a duteous daughter's head.

FRIENDSHIPS OF MOTHERS AND SONS.

CORNELIA, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and wife of Tiberius Gracchus, was left a widow, with a large family of young children. She refused all subsequent offers of marriage, even when Ptolemy of Egypt wished to share his throne with her. Her two sons, Tiberius and Caius, the tribunes who achieved such greatness and fame, owed every thing to her judicious training, to her wise and unwearied pains in educating them, guarding them, and inspiring them to high deeds. She was almost idolized by the Roman people, and occupied, indeed, the proudest position of any woman in the history of her country. Her two sons venerated, and invariably took counsel with their mother.

It is evident that their inner lives were shared with her. One of them was known to have dropped, at her request, a law which he meant to urge through the Senate. Cicero says that Catulus pronounced a public panegyric on his mother, Popilia, the first time such a thing was done in Rome. In a less formal manner, Caius Gracchus often publicly spoke the praises of his mother, Cornelia. When her sons were murdered, she bore the cruel affliction with imposing magnanimity. Departing from Rome, she took up her abode at Misenum, where, in the exercise of a queenly hospitality, she lived, surrounded by illustrious men of letters, as well as by others of the highest rank and distinction. Universally honored and respected, she reached a good old age, and finally received at the hands of the Roman people a statue inscribed, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi. Notwithstanding her somewhat meddlesome and despotic temper, Queen Olympias seems to have maintained an intimate friendship with her son, Alexander the Great. He omitted no occasion, we are told, of showing his esteem and affection for her. When absent on his campaigns, he kept up a constant correspondence with her, highly valuing her letters, and in return concealing nothing from her. Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, a sublime example of this friendship, sit on the shore of fame, side by side; the face of the mother a little above that of the son; both of them worn with care, full of lofty pathos and love, looking at us out of the night of time; the sea of mortal passion far beneath their feet; the eternal stars hanging silent above, even as Ary Scheffer reveals in his solemn picture of them sitting in the window at Ostia, and gazing together over the ocean.

Thirty years after the death of Monica, Augustine said in one of his sermons, "Ah! The dead do not come back; for, had it been possible, there is not a night when I should not have seen my mother, she who could not live apart from me, and who, in all my wanderings, never forsook me. For God forbid that in heaven her affection should cease, or that she should not, if she could, have come to console me when I suffered! She who loved me more than words can express." The example, in American history, of a valued and fruitful friendship between a mother and a son, given by Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams, is stamped with prominence by the exceptional fact of the publication of her letters to him. These letters breathe wisdom and virtue, with incitement to all worthy aims, no less than strong mental companionship and fervent maternal sympathy. They have been edited by her grandson, who pays her a deserved tribute in the memoir he has prefixed. The wife of the elder President Adams can never lose the exalted place she holds, in the honoring remembrance of the American people, among those exemplary women whose powerful talents and virtues did so much to mould the destinies of the nascent Republic. Madame Goethe said to Bettine, "My Wolfgang and I were so nearly of an age, that we grew up together more as playmates than as mother and child." And, when the great Wolfgang was an old man, he said that his mother, as yet quite a child, grew up to consciousness first with, then in, himself and his sister Cornelia. Her intercourse with him is prominent through a large part of his life: her influence on him is visible through the whole of it. The union of the illustrious brothers Humboldt with their mother was especially full and tender. While she lived, they shared souls; and, after her departure, the sons idolized her memory. Long years had passed, when William, expiring in the arms of his elder brother, said, "I shall soon be with our mother." And Alexander said, "I did not think my old eyes had so many tears." The relation of Guizot, the distinguished French statesman and author, with his mother, was one of the deepest, fullest, and noblest friendships that ever conjoined mother and son. Madame Guizot went through the horror and tragedy of the Revolution, to which her husband was one of the choicest victims, with a heroism and a dignity unsurpassed; and devoted herself to her maternal duties with a calm energy and wisdom whose proper fruits she lived long to enjoy. Her character revealed the purest feminine qualities in conspicuous perfection. Her honored old age showed all that is lovely and all that is august united, in her history, her spirit, her manners, her acquirements, and her presence, to attract confidence and to command respect. Indissolubly joined, through more than sixty years, with her brilliant and high-souled son, she was not more proud and fond of him than he was of her.

FRIENDSHIPS OF DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS.

CICERO and his daughter, Tullia, enjoyed an extraordinary friendship. From all the hints left us, it is to be gathered that Tullia was a woman of sweet and noble character. It is certain that she was most affectionately devoted to her father; and that she had accomplishments of knowledge and taste, qualifying her to be his companion and his delight in his age and grief. It is affecting to read how eagerly, on his recall from exile, she hurried to Brundusium to throw herself into his arms. She died at about thirty-two. He was thrown into a state of lamentable prostration. Turn where he would in his inconsolable sorrow, engage in whatever he might, tears constantly overtook him. His friends, Atticus, Csar, Brutus, Sulpicius, and others, wrote letters of sympathy to him. He retired to one of country-seats. Seeking the solace of solitude, he buried himself every morning in the thickest of the wood, and came not out till evening. In his former reverses, he says he could turn to one place for shelter and peace. "A daughter I had, in whose sweet conversation I could drop all my cares and troubles.

But now every thing is changed." "It is all over with me, Atticus: I feel it more than ever now that I have lost the only being who still bound me to life." He purposed to erect on a commanding site, as a monument to his dear Tullia, a splendid temple, which, as though dedicated to some god, should survive all the changes of ownership, and bear to distant futurity the memory of her worth, and of his sorrow for her. For a long time, he could think of nothing but the details of this plan, on which he intended to lavish the bulk of his fortune. He avoided society for almost a year, and never recovered from the wound which the loss of her gave his heart. Margaret Roper was the pride and darling of her father, Sir Thomas More, whom in return she venerated and loved with the whole depth of her heart. The beauty of their relation cannot be forgotten by those who have read the life of the great English martyr. It was by her brave duteousness that his mutilated body was buried in the chancel of Chelsea Church. His head, exposed upon a pole on London Bridge for fourteen days, was ordered to be thrown into the Thames; but Margaret rescued it, preserved it in a leaden box, and directed that, after her death, it should be placed with her in the grave.

One of the loveliest examples of this class of friendships is unveiled by William Wirt in the exquisite memoir he wrote of his daughter, Agnes, after her death at the early age of sixteen. The example is closely parallel to that of the famous and good John Evelyn, who, apostrophizing his daughter, Mary, in mournful memory, says, "Thy affection, duty, and love to me was that of a friend as well as of a child." So Wirt writes of his Agnes: "To me she was not only the companion of my studies, but the sweetener of my toils. The painter, it is said, relieved his aching eyes by looking on a curtain of green. My mind, in its hour of deepest fatigue, required no other refreshment than one glance at my beloved child, as she sat beside me." Not many fathers and daughters have been fonder or faster friends than Aaron and Theodosia Burr. The character and memory of Burr, in the popular imagination, have been blackened beyond the hope of bleaching. Of course, he was a man mixed of good and bad; and was not such an unmitigated devil as some would paint him. But his selfishness, sensuality, recklessness, and degradation give, in one respect, a peculiar interest and instructiveness to the enthusiastic friendship subsisting between him and his daughter. It is no disproof of the need of the great virtues to serve as the basis of a true and enduring friendship. It proves that a sincere love, even in an unclean and depraved soul, purges it, and adorns it with meritorious charms and real worth in that relation. However bad Burr may have been in other relations, to his daughter he was ever good, gentle, and wise, unwearied in his devotion, and clothed with many fascinations. Good persons may sometimes be ill-consorted and odious to each other, their intercourse full of jars and frictions. Bad persons may sometimes be so related as to show each other only their good qualities, and be happy friends, while all around are detesting them. In one of her letters to her father, Theodosia speaks of his wonderful fortitude, and goes on to say, "Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me so elevated above all other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I afterward revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear! My vanity would be greater, if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is in our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man." Burr, on the evening before his duel with Hamilton, wrote to his daughter a long letter, in which he said, "I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped, or even wished." Unhappily he slew his antagonist, and himself survived to carry a load of deadly and universal obloquy which would have crushed to the earth almost any other man.

Theodosia set sail from Charleston in a little vessel, which was never heard of again. It was supposed to have foundered off Cape Hatteras. The loss of his daughter, Burr said, "severed him from the human race." Certainly, from that time to the end of his prolonged and dishonored life, he never was wholly what he had been before. An inner spring had been broken, and the purest contents of his heart had escaped through the breach. Parton very fitly dedicates to the memory of Theodosia his highly readable and charitable life of her father. That brilliant lawyer, the late Rufus Choate, remarked, on reading this life, that there did not seem to have been in Burr a single glimpse of so much as the last and poorest tribute vice pays to virtue, not even the affectation of a noble sentiment. But we may claim with justice, that the friendship with his daughter is one bright place in that frightfully stained, one golden gleam on that dismally mutilated, career. Mention should be made of Richard and Maria Edgeworth, among those whose union as father and daughter, was merged in a superior fellowship as friends, in a more intimate and delightful junction of ideas, sentiments, and labors. Their united lives, their mutual devotion, their shared counsels, pleasures, and tasks, form one of the finest of domestic pictures, a model of a Christian household. In the preface to the life of himself which he left for Maria to complete and publish, he says, "If my daughter should perceive any extenuation or any exaggeration, it would wound her feelings, she would be obliged to alter or omit, and her affection for me would be diminished: can the public have a better surety than this for the accuracy of these memoirs?" And Maria says, "Few, I believe, have ever enjoyed such happiness, or such advantages, as I have had in the instructions, society, and unbounded confidence and affection of such a father and such a friend. He was, in truth, ever since I could think or feel, the first object and motive of my mind." One of the most remarkable friendships of this sort was that of Madame de Staël and her father. Necker was a kind, good, and able man, who occupied a distinguished position and played a prominent part in his time. But the genius of his impassioned daughter transfigured him into a hero and a sage. Her attachment to him was, in personal relations, the dominant sentiment of her life. With distinct comprehension and glowing sympathy, she entered into his thoughts and fortunes. She was to him an invaluable source of strength, counsel, and consolation.

An instance, partly ludicrous, illustrates her tender solicitude for him; and it also shows how the mere idea of an event has, with a person of her genius, the power of the actual occurrence. The coachman chanced to overset and considerably damage the empty family carriage. When told of it, she was indifferent until the idea of danger to her father struck her; then, exclaiming, "My God! had M. Necker been in it, he might have been killed," she rushed to the luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations, mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her father died, Madame de Staël was plunged into despairing grief, from which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy, which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often said, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." The touching words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed over, in which she summed up her life, were these: "I have always been the same, intense and sad. I have loved God, my father, and liberty." The unhappy Letitia Landon found a congenial friend in her father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her misfortunes. She closes her poem of "The Troubadour" with an affecting tribute to his memory:

My heart hath said no name but thine
Shall be on this last page of mine.

Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy the friendship of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the conditions of so blessed an experience.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS AND BROTHERS.

THE next class of friendships consists of those formed between brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common, are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a rich friendship spontaneously arises between a brother and a sister who advance to maturity in the same dwelling. A gifted woman, the author of "Counterparts" and "Charles Auchester," who, devoured by the flame of her own genius, died too young, has written, somewhat extravagantly, "O blessed sympathy of sisterhood with brotherhood! Surpassing all other friendship, leavening with angel solicitude the purest love of earth. No lovership like that of the brother and the sister, however passionate their spirits, when they truly love." Narcissus, in the classic fable, had a lovely sister, to whom he was most fondly attached. They were the images and mirrors of each other. It was only when death had snatched her from his side, that, pining under his bereavement, wandering by fountains and rivers, lie caught glimpses of his own reflection; and, mistaking the illusory show for his lost companion, fell in love with himself, and languished away till rejoined with her in the pale world of Hades.

Hardly any picture in literature is more famous than that of the friendship of Orestes and Electra. What divine beauty, what tragic pathos, what immortal truth, are in it! And the friendship of Antigone and Polynices is similar. With the Greeks this relation was under the special protection of Apollo and Diana, the divine brother and sister, whose physical representatives were the sun and moon. Iphigenia, priestess in Tauris, in her distress for her brother, prays to the goddess for pity and help:

For thou, Diana, lov'st thy gentle brother
Beyond what earth and heaven can offer thee,
And dost, with quiet yearning, ever turn
Thy virgin face to his eternal light.

A striking example of this relation, sustained with great fullness and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their retreats on Mount Cassino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night together in spiritual conversation and communion on the joys of heaven. Three days after their last interview, Scholastica died in her solitude. Benedict, rapt in contemplation on his mount at that moment, is said to have seen the soul of his sister ascend to heaven in the shape of a dove. He immediately sent for her body, and had it laid, with tender and solemn ceremonies, in the tomb which he had previously prepared for himself. The friendship of Tasso and his sister Cornelia has often been the theme of painting and of song. When, escaping from Ferrara, lacerated, irritated, melancholy, the poor half-mad poet fled from his persecutors, he thought he would test the affection of this early playmate and friend, whom he had not seen for many a weary year. Disguising himself as a shepherd, he presented himself before her in her home at Sorrento. He drew so piteous a picture of her brother's misfortunes and condition that she fainted. As soon as she recovered, he made himself known; and Torquato and Cornelia, with a swift revival of their old affection, were locked in a tender embrace, as has been described by Mrs. Hemans in a poem of extreme beauty and power of feeling.

The peaceful retreat, the glorious scenery, the gentle nursing, restored him to health and cheerfullness. Alas that he would not stay, but rushed away to his fate The beautiful and chivalrous Margaret of Navarre was a pattern of enthusiastic devotion to her brother, Francis I When Charles V carried him prisoner to Madrid, and he was dying there, she went to him through every peril, and, by her nursing, restored him. She then formed a friendship with the sister of Charles, and induced her secretly to espouse Francis, thus securing his deliverance by his imperial brother-in-law. The enduring monuments of art with which Francis embellished his kingdom were her inspiration. At a distance from him in his last illness, "she went every day, and sat down on a stone in the middle of the road, to catch the first glimpse of a messenger afar off. And she said, "Ah whoever shall come to announce the recovery of the king my brother, though he be tired, jaded, soiled, dishevelled, I will kiss him and embrace him as though he were the finest gentleman in the kingdom." Hearing of his death, she soon followed him. It is painful to know that the love of Francis to her was not a tithe of hers to him. He loved her, but treated her with a good deal of the feudal tyranny which belonged to the age. She deserved from him boundless tenderness and generosity. Sir Philip and Mary Sidney shared the same studies and labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name and dedication which the brother gave to his principal work are an imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of friends. Bishop Burnet has drawn for us a delightful picture of them. He says, "They were pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided; for, as he lived with her above forty years, so he did not outlive her a week." The countess "lived the longest on the most public scene, and made the greatest figure, in all the revolutions of these kingdoms for above fifty years, of any woman of that age." She laid out her time, her interest, and her estate, with the greatest zeal and success, in doing good to others, without regard to sects or relations. "When any party was down, she had credit and zeal enough to serve them; and she employed these so effectually, that, in the next turn, she had a new stock of credit, which she laid out wholly in that labor of love in which she spent her life. And though some particular opinions might shut her up in a divided communion, yet her soul was never of a party. She divided her charities and friendships both, her esteem as well as her bounty, with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any difference made upon the account of opinion. She had, with a vast reach of knowledge and apprehension, an universal affability and easiness of access, an humility that descended to the meanest persons and concerns, an obliging kindness and readiness to advise those who had no occasion for any farther assistance from her. And with all those and many other excellent qualities, she had the deepest sense of religion, and the most constant turning of her thoughts and discourses that way, that has been, perhaps, in our age. Such a sister became such a brother; and it was but suitable to both their characters, that they should have improved the relation under which they were born to the more exalted and endearing one of friend." Two of the most distinguished in the long roll of eminent astronomers are a brother and a sister, Sir William and Caroline Herschel. The story of their united labors, how, for thousands of nights, side by side they sat and watched and calculated and wrote, one sweeping the telescopic heavens, the other assisting, and noting down the results; how, with one spirit and one interest, they grew old together and illustrious together; their several achievements, both at home and in observatories on strange shores to which they voyaged, always associated; with what affectionate care she trained the favorite nephew, who was to burnish into still more effulgent brightness the star-linked name of Herschel, the story of all this is full of attractiveness, and forms one of the warm and poetic episodes in the high, cold annals of science. The union of John Aikin and his sister Letitia, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, in life, tastes, labors, was uncommonly close and complete. The narrative of it; so warm, substantial, and healthy was it, leaves a pleasing and invigorating influence on the sympathies of those who read it. They composed together several of their excellent and most useful literary works. While Mrs. Barbauld was tarrying at Geneva, her brother addressed a letter in verse to her:

Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast,
And paints one darling object unpossessed.
How many years have whirled their rapid course
Since we, sole streamlets from one honored source,
In fond affection, as in blood, allied,
Have wandered devious from each other's side,
Allowed to catch alone some transient view,
Scarce long enough to think the vision true!
Oh! then, while yet some zest of life remains;
While transport yet can swell the beating veins;
While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat,
And fancy still retains some genial heat;
When evening bids each busy task be o'er,
Once let us meet again, to part no more!

That evening came. In the village of Stoke Newington, they spent the last twenty years of their lives, in that close neighborhood which admitted of the daily, almost hourly, interchanges of mind and heart. There was a friendship of great strength between Goethe and his sister Cornelia. She was only a year younger than her brother, his companion in plays, lessons, and trials, bound to him by the closest ties and innumerable associations. While she was yet in the cradle, he prepared dolls and amusements for her, and was very jealous of all who came between them.

They grew up in such union, that, as he afterwards said, they might have been taken for twins. The sternness of their father drove them into a more confiding sympathy. When he had become a young man, and was accustomed to make frequent excursions, he says, "I was again drawn towards home, and that by a magnet which attracted me strongly at all times: it was my sister." Cornelia had superior endowments of mind, great force and truth of character; but she keenly felt her want of beauty, "a want richly compensated by the unbounded confidence and love borne to her by all her female friends." And yet Goethe says, "When my connection with Gretchen was torn asunder, my sister consoled me the more warmly, because she felt the secret satisfaction of having got rid of a rival; and I, too, could not but feel a great pleasure when she did me the justice to assure me that I was the only one who truly loved, understood, and esteemed her." At twenty-three, Cornelia was married to one of Goethe's intimate friends, Schlosser; and, in four years, she died. In one of her brother's frequent allusions to her, this striking trait is recorded: "Her eyes were not the finest I have ever seen, but the deepest, behind which you expected the most meaning; and when they expressed any affection, any love, their glance was without its equal." In his autobiography, written long, long after her death, he says,

"As I lost this beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could be thought of for it than that of the Richardsonian romance. But the tumult of the world called me away from this beautiful and pious design, as it has from so many others; and nothing now remains for me but to call up, for a moment, that blessed spirit, as if by the aid of a magic mirror."

A relation of a more absorbing character than the foregoing existed between Jacobi and his sister Lena. "For a long series of years," Steffens writes, "she lived one life with her brother, even ennobling and exalting him by her presence. She took part in all his studies, all his controversies; and changed the still self-communion of the lonely man into a long conversation." There are many accounts, given by contemporaries, of her minute carefullness for him and unwearied devotion to him. Some make the picture a little comical, from the excess of coddling; but all agree as to the unfailing and affectionate sincerity of their attachment.

There was an uncommon friendship between Chateaubriand and his youngest sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius, spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives." "Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness, imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves, and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages in his long autobiography.

Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and name.

The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a naïve simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,

The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears; A
heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love and thought and joy.

They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until
William's marriage; nor were they parted then.

This plot of orchard-ground is ours:
My trees they are, my sister's flowers.

When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in hexameters, in which were these lines:

William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.

At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,

When every day brought with it some new sense
Of exquisite regard for common things,
And all the earth was budding with these gifts
Of more refined humanity, thy breath,
Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,
That went before my step.

She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:

Then it was,
Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister, in whose sight
Those days were passed,…
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.

Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company. His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the "Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her. And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will, better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.

Mine eyes did ne'er
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either she, whom now I have, who now
Divides with me that loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned,
Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang.
The thought of her was like a flash of light,
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind.

The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley called

The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head, like heaven, is bent—
An early but enduring monument.

Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady lustre as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England. With what convulsive gratitude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he has expressed with that passionate richness of power which no other could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew drear and dark," he says,

When fortune changed, and love fled far,
And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast,
Thou wert the solitary star
Which rose, and set not to the last.

The wonderful verses commencing,

Though the day of my destiny's over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find,

wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into language of such vigor and such melody.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,
Thus much I at least may recall:
It hath taught me that what I most cherished
Deserved to be dearest of all.
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

To her he sent one of the first presentation copies of "Childe Harold," with this inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate brother." He wrote to her those expressions of love beginning,

The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine;

and ending,

Nor could on earth a spot be found
To nature and to me so dear,
Could thy dear eyes,
In following mine,
Still sweeten more
These banks of Rhine,

expressions so transcendently fond and earnest in their beauty, that it is a thrilling luxury to linger on them, return to them, and repeat them over and over.

One of the finest and richest productions of his genius, both in thought and in passion, is the poem he wrote to her when he was living at Diodati, on the banks of Leman.

My sister, my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Mountains and seas divide us; but I claim
No tears, but tenderness to answer mine.
Go where I will, to me thou art the same,
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny,
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.

I feel almost, at times, as I have felt
In happy childhood: trees and flowers and brooks,
Which do remember me of where I dwelt
Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books;
Come as of yore upon me, and can melt
My heart with recognition of their looks;
And even, at moments, I could think I see
Some living thing to love, but none like thee.

Oh that thou wert but with me! but I grow
The fool of my own wishes, and forget
The solitude which I have vaunted so
Has lost its praise in this but one regret.

The last intelligible words of Byron were,
"Augusta, Ada, my sister, my child."

It would be hard to find a friendship more deeply rooted, more inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister," composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of his single attack of insanity.

Thou to me didst ever show
Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.

Mary was ten years older than Charles, and, as is shown well in Talfourd's "Final Memorials," loved him with an affection combining a mother's care, a sister's tenderness, and a friend's fervent sympathy. Nor did he, in return, fall short in any respect. He appreciated her devotion, pitied her sorrow, responded to her feelings, revered her worth, and ministered to her wants with a loving gentleness, a patient self-sacrifice, and an heroic fortitude, which, as we gaze on his image, make the halo of the saint and the crown of the martyr alternate with the wrinkles of his weaknesses and his mirth. In one of her periodical paroxysms of madness, Mary struck her mother dead with a knife. Charles was then twenty-two, full of hope and ambition, enthusiastically attached to Coleridge, and in love with a certain "fair-haired maid," named Anna, to whom he had written some verses. This fearful tragedy altered and sealed his fate. He felt it to be his duty to devote himself thenceforth to his unhappy sister. He abandoned every thought of marriage, gave up his dreams of fame, and turned to his holy charge, with a chastened but resolute soul. "She for whom he gave up all," De Vincy says, "in turn gave up all for him. And of the happiness, which for forty years or more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her." He never thought his sacrifice of youth and love gave him any license for caprice towards her or exactions from her. He always wrote of her as his better self, his wiser self, a generous benefactress, of whom he was hardly worthy. "Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister is the most thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness." He was happy when she was well and with him. His great sorrow was to be obliged so often to part from her on the recurrences of her attacks. "To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand. It would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing I do from her. All my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me." Their hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious at the time of her brother's death, and the blow was mercifully deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:

Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow,
The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast.
Her only mate is now the minstrel lark,
Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark
Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed
A sister's tears.

Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.

The union of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn was something wonderful, like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them both. Such pure, tender, and noble souls are made for each other. The more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions, too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London, sent to Fanny a letter composed in notes, she translated it first with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth. Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix, amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of his soul, rushed to the piano, and poured out his anguish in an improvisation of wailing and mysterious strains, which held the assembly spell-bound and in tears. In a few days a letter reached him, announcing that his sister had died at that very hour. On receiving the tidings, he uttered a shriek, and the shock was so great as to burst a blood-vessel in his brain. Life had no charm potent enough to stanch and heal the cruel laceration left in his already failing frame by this sundering blow. The web of torn fibrils bled invisibly. He soon faded away, and followed his sister to a world of finer melody, fitted for natures like theirs.

One of the noblest and wisest of the American poets the pure, brave, and devout Whittier had a sister who was to him very much what Dorothy was to Wordsworth. Several of her poems are printed with his. They always lived together; they studied together, rambled together, had a large share of their whole consciousness together. After her death, sitting alone in his wintry cottage, he said to a friend who was visiting him, that, since she was gone, to whose faithful taste and judgment he had been wont to submit all he wrote, he could hardly tell of a new production whether it were good or poor. He also said that the sad measure of his love for her was the vacancy which her departure had left. He has paid her, in his "Snow-Bound," this tribute, which will draw readers as long as loving hearts are left in his land:

As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Gainst the household bosom lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed within the fadeless green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh! looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago: The chill
weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where'er I went,
With dark eyes full of love's content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June's unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life's late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

One more instance of intense friendship between a brother and a sister and it is one of the most interesting that history reveals to us shall close this list. Maurice de Guérin was born in Languedoc, in France, in the year 1811; and there also, in 1839, he died. Although snatched away at twenty-eight, his fascinating personality and genius left an indelible impression on all appreciative persons who had come in contact with him. His writings, few and unelaborate as they are, have won admiring praise from the judges whose verdict is fame. His sister Eugénie, six years older than himself, took the place of mother as well as that of sister to the orphan boy. He was not more extraordinary for winsomeness and talent than she was for combined power of intelligence, tenacity of affection, and religiousness of principle. They became ardent friends, in the most emphatic meaning of the term. Maurice went to Paris to try his fortune as a writer. Eugénie's yearning and anxious heart followed him in rapid letters. She tells him how they whom he has left all love him, encourages him with virtue and piety, adjures him to be true to his best self. She says to him, with the irresistible eloquence of the heart, "We see things with the same eyes: what you find beautiful, I find beautiful. God has made our souls of one piece." Maurice's replies were shorter and rarer. It is evident, the reader feels it with a pang of regret, that Eugénie was much less to Maurice than he was to her; and yet he loved her well. But man's love is usually poor compared with woman's; and he was in the throngs of Paris, she in the solitude of a country home. He fell away from his original purity and constancy, lost his religious faith for a season, and seemed almost to forget those who idolized him with such deep fondness. Was he not one of the charmers, who are so much to others, but to whom others are in return comparatively so little?

Falling ill, he revisited home, and by the stainless affections, unwearied attentions, and devout routine there, was restored in soul as well as in body. When, not long afterwards, he had fallen in love with a West-Indian lady, a beautiful Creole, Eugénie went to him in Paris, and devoted herself sedulously to promote the marriage. It was brought about, and she spent a happy six months with the wedded pair. After her return to Languedoc, we find her writing in her journal, "My Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart? to find that this marriage, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us more asunder than ever? I have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your sister's portion! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has the power of loving."

Two months after these pathetic words were written, Maurice died, of a rapid consumption, in his father's house, ministered to by his wife and sisters with infinite tenderness and agonizing despair. In the last moment, his sister says, "He glued his lips to a cross that his wife held out to him, then sank: we all fell to kissing him, and he to dying." The shock came upon Eugénie with crushing severity. Ever after, she was haunted by the memory of "his beloved, pale face," "his beautiful head." Long afterwards, she wrote, "The whole of to-day I see pass and repass before me that dear, pale face: that beautiful head assumes all its various aspects in my memory, smiling, eloquent, suffering, dying." "Poor, beloved soul," she says, "you have had hardly any happiness here below: your life has been so short, your repose so rare, O God! uphold me. How we have gazed at him and loved him and kissed him, his wife and we, his sisters; he lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were asleep! My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see each other again on earth?"

Five years previous to her brother's death, Eugénie had begun a journal, which she forwarded to him from time to time. After the funeral, she tried to continue this, addressing it still to him: "To Maurice dead, to Maurice in heaven. He was the pride and joy of my heart. Oh, how sweet a name, and how full of tenderness, is that of brother!" She persevered for five months, when it became too painful, and she abandoned it. From this time till death overtook her, in the year 1848, she seemed to have but one purpose; namely, to secure Maurice's fame by the publication of his literary remains. Poverty and various other obstacles baffled all her efforts. But, in 1858, M. Trebutien, a loving and faithful friend, edited and published, in a single volume, the "Journal and Letters of Maurice de Guérin;" and, five years later, he published, in a companion volume, the "Journal and Letters of Eugénie de Guérin." The striking original genius and worth of these volumes, and the enviable praise already awarded them, insure for their authors a beautiful and enduring fame together. As long as the words of this devoted sister shall win the attention of gentle readers, tears will spring into their eyes, and a throb of pitying love fill their hearts with pleasing pain. "My soul slips easily into thee, O soul of my brother!" "We were two eyes looking out of one forehead." "My thought was only a reflex of my brother's; so vivid when he was there, then changing into twilight, and now gone." "O beautiful past days of my youth, with Maurice, the king of my heart!" "I am on the horizon of death: he is below it. All that I can do is to strain my gaze into it."

FRIENDSHIPS OF WIVES AND HUSBANDS.

THE friendships between persons of opposite sex, thus far considered, spring up under the primary impulse of consanguinity, and embroider themselves around the fostering relations of natural duty. Based on affiliation of descent, organic community of circumstances, and mixture of experience, and sanctioned by the most authoritative seals of social opinion, they are, when not impoverished or poisoned by any evil interference, warm, precious, and sacred. The strongest preventives of their frequency and the commonest drawbacks from their power are the dullness which creeps over all emotions under the dominion of passive habit, and the tendency to look elsewhere for more vivid attachments, more exciting associations.

But there is another class of friendships, more important in influence, if not in number, having also the highest sanctions both of law and of custom, and marked by such peculiarities that they constitute a species by themselves. It consists of the friendships which grow up between husbands and wives, within the shielded enclosure of matrimony. The community of interests between those united in wedlock if they are married in truth as well as in form is the most intimate and entire that can exist.

Their unqualified surrender and blending of lives, unreserved confidence and conjunction of hearts, afford, on the one hand, the most hazardous, on the other hand, the most propitious, conditions for a perfect mutual reflection of souls with all their contents. Nowhere else has knowledge such free scope, have the inducements for esteem or contempt such unhampered range, as in this relation. The inmost secrets of the parties are always exposed to revelation or to betrayal. Hypocrisy and deception are reduced to the narrowest limits. Accordingly, both the most absolute antagonism and misery, and the most absolute sympathy and happiness, are known in the conjugal union. Milton puts in the mouth of Samson a fearful expression of the former:

To wear out miserable days, Intangled with a poisonous bosom snake.

Of the latter we have an affecting instance in the historic narrative of that Italian Countess del Verme, who, losing her husband after an elysian union for eight years, was so shocked on learning his death, that she threw herself on his body in a convulsion of grief which broke her heart, and she instantly died beside him.

Are the parties selfish, unfeeling, ungenuine? Every possible opportunity is afforded for the base and alien qualities to recognize each other, and clash or effervesce. Is one wise, aspiring, magnanimous? the other, foolish, vulgar, revengeful? The yoke, pulled contrary ways, must gall and irritate. Then the fellowship of husband and wife is like that of acid and alkali. But, if they are filled with consecrating tenderness, sweet patience, and earnest purposes, all possible motives urge them to adjust their characters and conduct to each other; to tune their intercourse by heavenly laws; to mingle their experience in one blessed current; to soothe, support, and beautify each other's being. Then there results a union, including every faculty, satisfying every want, unparalleled for its integrity and its blessedness. In such cases as this, it may truly be said, marriage is the queen of all friendships.

A beautiful example of such a union is unveiled, in the tribute paid to his wife, by Sir James Mackintosh. He says, "I found an intelligent companion and a tender friend, a prudent monitress, the most faithful of wives, and a mother as tender as children ever had the misfortune to lose. I met a woman, who, by tender management of my weaknesses, gradually corrected the most pertinacious of them. She became prudent from affection; and, though of the most generous nature, she was taught frugality and economy by her love for me. She gently reclaimed me from dissipation, propped my weak and irresolute nature, urged my indolence to all the exertion that has been useful and creditable to me, and was perpetually at hand to admonish my heedlessness or improvidence. In her solicitude for my interest, she never for a moment forgot my feelings or character. Even in her occasional resentment, for which I but too often gave her cause, (would to God I could recall those moments!) she had no sullenness or acrimony. Such was she whom I have lost, when her excellent natural sense was rapidly improving, after eight years' struggle and distress had bound us fast together and moulded our tempers to each other; when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, and before age had deprived it of much of its original ardor."

It is to be presumed that those who enter into a relation with each other on which so much of their destiny is staked, take the step under the influence of love. And by love the love which looks to a conjugal union is to be understood a general movement of personal sympathy, imparting a special richness and intensity to the imagination in its action toward the individuals concerned, and thus giving each of them a genial and generous idea of the other to govern their mutual references; the whole operation being animated and emphasized, more or less prominently, by the impulse of sex. The idea of each other with which the wedded pair begin their union, an idea ennobled and vivified by imagination, and serving as the basis and stimulus of their love, may be largely made up of illusions, or may be sound, though inadequate. In the former case, one of three results will follow, either, as the poetic illusions are dispelled, and the fancied charms of the soul are replaced by barren poverty or haggard ugliness, the ardor of affection will be reversed by disappointment and friction into antipathy, engendering a chronic state, sometimes of fierce hatred, sometimes of sullen dislike; or that affection, robbed of its moral supports, admiration, gratitude, faith, and desire, will subside into a condition of spiritual tedium, unnoticing routine; or else, the imaginative element dying out, while the sexual element retains or perhaps even exaggerates its force, love will degenerate into lust. These three results depict the real union subsisting between three classes of husbands and wives, when the hymeneal glow has passed, and fixed realities assert their sway. The first is a hideous association of enemies, a yoked animosity; the second, a lukewarm connection of colleagues, an external partnership; the third, a convenient alliance of pleasure seekers, an animal cohabitation.

But that imaginative stir which lends such ardor and elevation to the honeymoon period is not always a fermentation of happy error. It is many times a fruition of beauty and good, resting on a perception of realities, growing greater, lovelier, more efficacious, with the growing powers and opportunities for appreciation. In these cases, where the divine bias which causes the newly wedded twain to put a beautiful interpretation on all the signs of each other's being depends not on illusion, but originates in truth, and where no fatal alloy or shock interferes to destroy it, the blessed affection in which they live together, instead of souring into aversion, stagnating into indifference, or sinking to a baser level than it began on, will naturally triumph over other changes, and grow more comprehensive and noble, as enlarged experiences disclose vaster grounds for justifying it, and furnish finer stimulants to feed it. In such instances, the beautifying tinges of romance, that streak and flush the horizon, neither fade into the grayness of fact, nor die into the darkness of neglect, but now broaden and deepen into the blue of meridian assurance, now clarify and ascend into the starlight of faith and mystery. The conditions that originally inspired the confiding and admiring sympathy become, with the lapse of time and the progress of acquaintance, more pronounced and more adequate, and insure a union ever fonder and more blunt. A husband and wife so united generally remain a pair of lovers, but sometimes become a pair of friends. Which of these two names is most descriptive of the union depends on the relative space held in it by the element of sense and sex. With some this ingredient is so important, that it infuses its quality into their very thoughts, and gives the distinctive character of love to their whole relation. With others this feature in the marriage fellowship becomes relatively less as the heyday of youth subsides, and the moral and mental bonds become more various and extensive. The physical tie, however vital, is insignificant in comparison with the entire web of their conscious ties. Love is included in their whole relation, as a rivulet threading a lake. This subordination of the stream to the lake is surest to take place with those in whom pure mind most predominates, whose spirit is least roiled by the perturbation of the senses. With such it is almost a necessity, when hate or indifference does not intervene, that love should refine into friendship. As the ferment of passion ceases, the lees settle, and a transparent sympathy appears, reflecting all heavenly and eternal things.

As an example of the transmutation of passion into sentiment, of impulse into principle, of feverish flame into calm fire, we may instance the Greek Pericles and Aspasia, who were friends even more than lovers, their intellectual companionship and common pursuit of culture being one of the precious traditions of humanity. Grote, whose learning, ability, and fairness give weight to his opinion, affirms his belief that the vile charges brought against Aspasia were the offspring of lying gossip and scandal. The estimate of her talents and accomplishments was so high that the authorship of the greatest speech ever delivered by Pericles was attributed to her. She is also particularly interesting to us as the first woman who kept an open parlor for the visits of chosen friends and the culture of conversation, as the earliest queen of the drawing room. Her house was the centre of the highest literary and philosophical society of Athens. Socrates himself was a constant visitor there. There too, as Plutarch asserts, many of the most distinguished Athenian matrons were wont to go with their husbands for the pleasure and profit of her conversation.

In Roman history we may point to Brutus and his heroic Portia, who was fully capable of entering into all his counsels, dangers, and hopes, and, when he fell, of dying as became the daughter of Cato. The characters of the noble and Arria were likewise in perfect accord, in their high strains of wisdom, valor, and virtue; and when the brutal emperor, Claudius, commanded the death of her husband, the wife, stabbing herself, handed him the dagger, with the immortal words, "Brutus, it does not hurt."

Seneca and his Paulina were bound together by community of tastes and acquirements, and unbroken happiness. He asks, "What can be sweeter than to be so dear to your wife that it makes you dearer to yourself?" When the tyrant ordered the philosopher to commit suicide, his wife insisted on opening her veins, and dying with him. After long resistance, he consented, saying, "I will not deprive you of the honor of so noble an example." But Nero would not allow her to die thus, and had her veins bound up; not, however, until she had lost so much blood that her blanched face, for the rest of her days, gave rise to the well known rhetorical comparison, "as pale as Seneca's Paulina."

Calpurnia, likewise, the wife of the younger Pliny, was identified with her husband in all his studies, ambitions, triumphs. She fashioned herself after his pattern, knew his works by heart, sang his verses, listened behind a screen to his public speeches, drinking in the applauses lavished on him. We may justly infer from the whale character of the "Letter of Consolation," which he wrote to her, on occasion of the death of their beloved daughter, Timoxena, that a relation similar to the one just mentioned subsisted between Plutarch and his wife.

By friendship in marriage is meant companionship of inner lives, community of aims and efforts, the lofty concord of aspiring minds. These are comparatively few, as made known to us in classic antiquity, owing to the jealous separation of the sexes in social life, that strict subjection of woman to man, which was characteristic of the ancient world. If we were thinking of wedded love instead of wedded friendship, it would be easy to cull a host of affecting and imposing instances: such as, the Hebrew Rebekah and Rachel; the Greek Alcestis; the Hindu Savitri; the Persian Pantheia; and a glorious crowd of Roman matrons, like Lucretia, who have left a renown as grand and deathless as the memory of Rome itself.

The modern examples of fortunate friendship in marriage are more numerous than the ancient ones. Two delightful instances, particularly worthy of study, have been so fully described by Mrs. Jameson as to make superfluous any thing more than a slight allusion here. The first of these pairs is the early English poet, William Habington, and his Castara. Habington collected and published, in two rich parts, the poems he wrote to Castara before and after his marriage, and added a preface full of choice thought and heartfelt emotion. By her husband's pen,

Castara's name
Is writ as fair in the register of fame
As the ancient beauties, which translated are,
By poets, up to heaven, each there a star.

The illustrious Roman lawyer, Giambattista Zappi, and Faustina Maratti were the other pair alluded to, whose wedded love was crowned with a superior friendship. Zappi is celebrated for his sublime sonnet on the Moses of Michael Angelo. But the most of his verses were inspired by his wife, and dedicated to her. Her verses were almost exclusively inspired by her husband, and dedicated to him. Their works are published together in one volume.

Roland, the famous Girondist minister, a man of marked abilities and incorruptible integrity, married the gifted and high souled Jeanne Philippon a short time before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He was twenty two years her senior. Her love for him, founded on his philosophic spirit and antique virtues, was so ardent and so faithful that she has often been called "the Heloise of the eighteenth century." Their principles, their souls, their hopes, their toils and sufferings, were alike and inseparable. They hailed the early efforts of the Revolutionists as the dawn of a golden age for mankind. Madame Roland shared in the studies of her husband, aided him in his compositions, and served as his sole secretary during his two ministries. No intrigue of his party was unknown to her, or uninfluenced by her genius. Yet no falsehood or trickery debased, no meanness sullied her. "She was the angel of the cause she espoused, the soul of honor, and the conscience of all who embraced it." When Robespierre overthrew the Girondists, Roland, with others of his party, saved his life by a flight to Rouen. His wife was soon sentenced to death by the infamous Fouquier Tinville. She rode to the guillotine clad in white, her glossy black hair hanging down to her girdle, and embraced her fate with divine courage and dignity. Hearing the direful news, Roland walked a few miles out of Rouen, and deliberately killed himself with his cane sword. His body was found by the roadside, with a paper containing his last words: "Whoever thou art that findest these remains, respect them as those of a man who consecrated his life to usefullness, and who dies, as he has lived, honest and virtuous. Hearing of the death of my wife, I would not remain another day on this earth so stained with crimes."

All appreciative readers of the works and the life of Herder gratefully associate his Caroline with their recollections of him. Under the stress of his many sore trials, this great, vexed, struggling, sorrowing man would have succumbed to his afflictions, and entered the grave much earlier than he did, if it had not been for the solace and strength his wife gave him at home; and not a little of his present celebrity is due to the devoted energy of pride and affection with which she labored to have justice done to his writings and his memory.

A spotless and exalted pair of friends look out of English history at us, in the faces of John and Lucy Hutchinson. He was governor of Nottingham, and one of the judges of Charles I. In her widowhood, Lady Hutchinson drew that wonderful portrait of her husband which has been styled the most perfect piece of biography ever penned by a woman.

John Austin, under crushing burdens and amidst freezing neglect, wrought out the profoundest exposition of jurisprudence which exists in the English language. His wife, Sarah Austin, distinguished for her early importation and unveiling of German literature to the English mind, was every thing to him that a tender, wise, and strong friend could be. In the prefaces to her publications of his posthumous works, the discerning reader may trace, through the modest concealment, something of one of the purest, deepest, most steadfast of those friendships which adorn while they enrich the annals of human nature.

One shrinks from the indelicacy of alluding to persons still living, and yet can hardly help suggesting what a friendship there must have been in the union of such scholars, thinkers, poets, aspirants, as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But space would fail for a list of the royal friendships of this class revealed in literary records. And, for every example published, there must obviously be a multitude, quite as sweet and grand, which are hidden in purely private life.

Leopold Schefer, the serene and lofty author of the "Layman's Breviary," that charming work just published in our country in the fine translation of Charles T. Brooks, lost his wife in the twenty fifth year of their marriage. What a friend he had in her appears from the simple words, surcharged with feeling, in which he speaks of her. He writes, "Only a single unconquerable sorrow has smitten me in all my life, the death of the still soul with whom life, for the first time, was to me a life. Nor have I had any other troubles. People who make trouble for themselves, and in an unappeased spirit find an everlasting misery, may properly call me still a fortunate man. But, though outwardly as much grass should grow over her grave as ever can grow in long desolated days and nights, inwardly no grass grows over a real life annihilating grief. One gets re adjusted with the world; but, after all, he goes at last with an open wound into the grave. Believe me in this."

An example yet more recent has obtained such a monumental recognition, that mention of it is not here to be avoided. John Stuart Mill dedicates his imperishable "Essay on Liberty" to his deceased wife in these terms:

"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings, the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward, I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work, as it stands, has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from any thing that I can write unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."

The conditions favoring the formation of a consummate friendship between husband and wife meet in fortunate combination in two classes of instances.

In the first, the sovereignty is the bond of a common nobleness; in the second, the bond of a common ambition. The united worship of truth, beauty, goodness, make, it is to be hoped, the most absolute friends of unnumbered wedded pairs. One adoring pursuit of excellence, one devout trust in God, one happy aiming at perfection, draws their noblest activities into unison, free from the impediments of selfishness and suspicion. Under the over arching sanctions of Divinity, knowing each other to be worthy and true, they confide in each other with the sympathy of a total esteem, based on a common devotion to the supreme prizes of the universe, whose reflected lustre already transfigures their spirits and sanctifies their persons in each other's eyes.

Many a husband and wife are also made friends, above all their mere love, by sharing in some earnest and condign social ambition. How many a man of genius has been chiefly indebted for his achievements to the wife who has sedulously identified herself with his success, ever at his side, unseen perhaps by the world, studying his art, lightening his tasks, soothing his pride, healing his hurts, stimulating his confidence, baffling his enemies, gaining him patrons or allies, assuaging his falls, refreshing his energy for new trials, and, when he has triumphed, and is applauded on his eminence, silently drinking in, as her reward, the popular admiration bestowed on him.

This intense co operation and struggle towards an outer goal, when unneutralized, produces that wondrous identification which is the type of complete friendship. A crowd of the most brilliant artists, authors, statesmen, might each point to his wife, and say, "To that bosom friend, to that guardian angel, to her quick intelligence, unfailing consolation, steady stimulus, I principally owe, under Heaven, what I am and what I have done." Many beautiful delineations of this fact have been given in fiction. The picture of Lord and Lady Davenant, in Miss Edgeworth's "Helen," is worthy of particular mention as a picture drawn to the life.

Nothing in fiction, however, is finer or more commanding, as an example of the true relation of the sexes, than is afforded in real life by the biography of Lord William and Lady Russell. Every such historic instance has a benign lesson for our time, in which, it is to be feared, many bad influences are working with fatal effect, temporarily at least, to lessen the attractions and undermine the sanctity of marriage, Guizot ends his beautiful and noble essay on the married life of Lord and Lady Russell with this impressive paragraph:

"I have felt profound pleasure in relating the history of this lady, so pure in her passion, always great and always humble in her greatness, devoted with equal ardor to her feelings and her duties in grief and joy, in triumph and adversity. Our times are attacked with a deplorable malady: men believe only in the passion which is attended with moral derangement. All ardent, exalted, and soul mastering sentiments appear to them impossible within the bounds of moral laws and social conventions. All order seems to them a paralyzing yoke, all submission a debasing servitude: no flame is any thing, if it is not a devouring conflagration. This disease is the graver because it is not the crisis of a fever nor the explosion of an exuberant force. It springs from perverse doctrines, from the rejection of law and faith, from the idolatry of man. And with this disease there is joined another no less lamentable: man not only adores nothing but himself, but even himself he adores only in the multitude where all men are confounded. He hates and envies every thing that rises above the vulgar level: all superiority, all individual grandeur, seems to him an iniquity, an injury towards that chaos of undistinguished and ephemeral beings whom he calls humanity. When we have been assailed by these base doctrines, and the shameful passions which give birth to or are born from them; when we have felt the hatefullness of them, and measured the peril, it is a lively delight to meet with one of those noble examples which are their splendid confutation. In proportion as I respect humanity in its totality, I admire and love those glorified images of humanity which personify and set on high, under visible features and with a proper name, whatever it has of most noble and most pure. Lady Russell gives the soul this beautiful and virtuous joy."

It is fitting, in the next place, to say something of the disappointment and wretchedness which so many married men and women notoriously experience in their relations with each other. It may be useful to state the principal causes of this unhappiness, and to give some definite directions in the way of remedy. Absence of love, absence of reason, absence of justice, absence of taste, in other words, harshness and neglect, silliness and frivolity, vice and crime, vulgarity and slovenliness, are the leading and inevitable creators of alienation, dislike, and misery in marriage. Whatever tends to increase these tends to multiply separations and divorces between those who cannot endure each other; and to multiply irritations, quarrels, sorrows, and agonies between those who may endure, but cannot enjoy, each other. In marriage, the intimacy is so great and constant that the slightest friction easily becomes galling. Nowhere beside is there such need of magnanimous forbearance in one, or else of equality of worth and refinement in both. "Love does not secure happiness in marriage, often the contrary: reason is necessary." So said the wise Jean Paul. He also said, "The best man joined with the worst woman has a greater hell than the best woman joined with the worst man." This is, no doubt, true as a general rule, because woman is so much more capable than man of self abnegation, silent patience, meek submission, and flexible adjustment to inevitable circumstances. Probably the women who keenly and chronically suffer from unhappy marriages are far more numerous than the kindred sufferers of the other sex. This is because they are more deeply susceptible to cruelty and indifference and to all the repulsive traits of character; are less capable of ignoring such things; have less of absorbing occupation of their own to take up their attention, and are less able to be absorbed in things beyond the personal and domestic sphere. There are unquestionably thousands of married women whose experience is made a living martyrdom by the infidelity, the tyranny, the coarseness, the general odiousness and wearisomeness of their husbands. In most cases, even where a divorce is wished, the shocking public scandal and disgrace are too much; and they wear on to the end. What misery delicate and conscientious women, of dedicated souls and polished manners, who love every thing that is pure and beautiful, are compelled to undergo in their bondage to husbands, ignorant, uninteresting, ignoble, relentlessly domineering, is not to be expressed. Their best weapons in such cases, if they knew it, are gentleness, patience, persuasion, and the skilful use of every means to improve and uplift their unequal companions to their own level. The Persian poet expressed a rich truth when he wrote, "Gentleness is the sail on the table of morals." It is a tragedy that the good wife of a bad husband is so identified with him, that the penalties of his offences fall on her head, often more terribly than on his. A pure woman loving a wicked man must expect to have her affections ravaged by his sins: does not the lightning drawn by the rod blast the innocent ivy entwining it? What lacerating woes the gambler, the drunkard, the forger, the adulterer, inflicts on his wife!

And yet, profound as is the misfortune, sharp as is the suffering of such, it may be doubted whether a noble, sensitive, cultivated man, with a yearning heart of softness and peace, a capacious mind full of grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and rasping tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret and sting, it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with his ill matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in the world. He had better marry a vinegar cruet than such a Tartar. When weary and seeking to rest, to be roused up by a scolding; when searching for truth, or contemplating beauty, or communing with God, or aspiring to perfection, or scheming some vast good for mankind, to be aggravated by abuse, insulted by false charges, dragged down to petty interests which he despises, and mixed up with wrongs and passions which he loathes, these degrading injuries, these wasteful vexations, are what he must endure. No wonder if he vehemently resents a treatment so incongruous with his worth. No wonder if, vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful. There is, to a high smiled man, no wrong more hurtful or more difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of life, and draws blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous, false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable, however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne. George Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean Jacques Rousseau, one does not acquire the faults of littleness, does not lose his native grandeur; but he feels his genius troubled, combated, worried, distempered, and he makes a pure loss of immense efforts to surmount miseries unworthy of him."

Let a husband be the true and pure guardian of his family, laboring always to adorn himself with the godlike gems of wisdom, virtue, and honor; let him bear himself in relation to his wife with gracious kindness towards her faults, with grateful recognition of her merits, with steady sympathy for her trials, with hearty aid for her better aspirations, and she must be of a vile stock, if she does not revere him, and minister unto him with all the graces and sweetness of her nature.

Let a wife, in her whole intercourse with her husband, try the efficacy of gentleness, purity, sincerity, scrupulous truth, meek and patient forbearance, an invariable tone and manner of deference, and, if he is not a brute, he cannot help respecting her and treating her kindly; and in nearly all instances he will end by loving her and living happily with her.

But if he is vulgar and vicious, despotic, reckless, so as to have no devotion for the august prizes and incorruptible pleasures of existence; if she is an unappeasable termagant, or a petty worrier, so taken up with trifling annoyances, that, wherever she looks, "the blue rotunda of the universe shrinks into a housewifery room;" if the presence of each acts as a morbid irritant on the nerves of the other, to the destruction of comfort, and the lowering of self respect, and the draining away of peace and strength, their companionship must infallibly be a companionship in wretchedness and loss.

The banes of domestic life are littleness, falsity, vulgarity, harshness, scolding vociferation, an incessant issuing of superfluous prohibitions and orders, which are regarded as impertinent interferences with the general liberty and repose, and are provocative of rankling or exploding resentments. The blessed antidotes that sweeten and enrich domestic life are refinement, high aims, great interests, soft voices, quiet and gentle manners, magnanimous tempers, forbearance from all unnecessary commands or dictation, and generous allowances of mutual freedom. Love makes obedience lighter than liberty. Man wears a noble allegiance, not as a collar, but as a garland. The Graces are never so lovely as when seen waiting on the Virtues; and, where they thus dwell together, they make a heavenly home.

No affection, save friendship, has any sure eternity in it. Friendship ought, therefore, always to be cultivated in love itself, as its only certain guard and preservative, not less than as the only sufficing substitute in its absence. A couple joined by love without friendship, walk on gunpowder with torches in their hands. Shall I venture to depict the sad decay which love naturally suffers, and the redemptive transformation which it sometimes undergoes? I will do it by translating a truthful and eloquent passage from Chateaubriand:

"At first our letters are long, vivid, frequent. The day is not capacious enough for them. We write at sunset; at moonrise we trace a few more lines, charging its chaste and silent light to hide our thousand desires. We watch for the first peep of dawn, to write what we believe we had forgotten to say in the delicious hours of our meeting. A thousand vows cover the paper, where all the roses of aurora are reflected; a thousand kisses are planted on the words, which seem born from the first glance of the sun. Not an idea, an image, a reverie, an accident, a disquietude, which has not its letter. Lo! one morning, something almost imperceptible steals on the beauty of this passion, like the first wrinkle on the front of an adored woman. The breath and perfume of love expire in these pages of youth, as an evening breeze dies upon the flowers. We feel it, but are unwilling to confess it. Our letters become shorter and fewer, are filled with news, with descriptions, with foreign matters; and, if any thing happens to delay them, we are less disturbed. On the subject of loving and being loved, we have grown reasonable. We submit to absence without complaint. Our former vows prolong themselves: here are still the same words; but they are dead. Soul is wanting in them. I love you is merely an expression of habit, a necessary form, the I have the honor to be of the love letter. Little by little the style freezes where it inflamed. The post day, no longer eagerly anticipated, is rather dreaded; writing has become a fatigue. We blush to think of the madnesses we have trusted to paper, and wish we could recall our letters and burn them. What has happened? Is it a new attachment which begins where an old one ends? No: it is love dying in advance of the object loved. We are forced to own that the sentiments of man are subjected to the effects of a hidden process: the fever of time, which produces lassitude, also dissipates illusion, undermines our passions, withers our loves, and changes our hearts even as it changes our locks and our years. There is but one exception to this human infirmity. There sometimes occurs in a strong soul a love firm enough to transform itself into impassioned friendship, so as to become a duty, and appropriate the qualities of virtue. Then, neutralizing the weakness of nature, it acquires the immortality of a principle."

Before leaving this part of the theme, it may not be out of place to express the belief, a belief founded on no hurried inference from a narrow survey of history, or from a superficial study of the data in the breast, that the greatest number of examples of the most impassioned, absorbing, and lasting affection between the sexes have occurred within the ties of marriage, and not outside of those ties. More than other kindred relations, these rest on the nourishing basis of public law and social honor, as well as of personal esteem and avowed identification of interests. Whatever necessitates secrecy, or compromises the fullness and frankness of self respect, even if it give piquancy and fire, takes away moral health, steady integrity; and inserts an insidious element, either of devouring fever or of slow decay. Other things being equal, affection, wedded under every legal and moral sanction, reaches the highest climax and is the most complete and enduring. Every failure implies some defect in the conditions. The readiness, in general, of illicit love to admit a substitute, its facility of consolation and forgetfullness when any fatal calamity has removed its object, demonstrates both its lower origin and its baser nature. In a well consorted marriage, the soul, the mind, esteem and faith, the pure strain of friendship, enter more largely. The grave is not the boundary of its functions. After death, the love is cherished in the ideal fife of the mind as vividly as ever, and with an added sanctity. Widowed memory clings to the disconsolate happiness of sitting by the fountain of oblivion, and drawing up the sunken treasure. If, as Statius said, to love the living be a pleasant indulgence, to love the dead is a religious duty:

Vivam amare, voluptas; defunctam, religio.

A multitude of nameless husbands and wives have experienced this truth in their bereavement; their love not decaying, but passing into resurrection. The Hindus have a fine parable of Kamadeva, the eastern Cupid. He shot Siva, who, turning on him in rage, reduced the mischievous archer to ashes. All the gods wept over his ashes. Then he arose in spiritual form, free from every physical trait or quality. Literature, both eastern and western, ancient and modern, gives us many instances of conjugal love outliving death, and, in holy tenderness of dedication, pleasing itself with all kinds of ideal restorations and celebrations of its object.

When Mausolus, king of Curia, died, his widow, Queen Artemisia, seemed thenceforth almost wholly absorbed in the memory of him. She built to him, at Halicarnassus, that magnificent monument, or mausoleum, which was known as one of the seven wonders of the world, and which became the generic name for all superb sepulchres. She employed the most renowned rhetors of the age to immortalize the glory of her husband, by writing and reciting his praises. At the consecration of the wondrous fabric which she had reared in his honor, she offered a prize for the most eloquent eulogy on Mausolus. All the orators of Greece were invited to the contest. Theopompus bore off the prize. It is said, that, during the two years by which she survived her royal spouse, she daily mixed some of his ashes with her drink, so that, ere their spirits met in Hades, her body was the tomb of his. Unquestionably there is something greatly overstrained in this; but the whole story is one of the most signal instances, handed down from the past, of an intense wedded affection triumphant over death, and crowning itself with death.

Still more costly honors than Artemisia lavished on her Mausolus, did the Great Mogul, Shah Jehan, grandson of Akhar and father of Aurungzebe, pay to his idolized wife, Moomtaza Mahul. She died, in 1631, in giving birth to a daughter. Shah Jehan's love for this exquisite being appears to have been supreme and irreplaceable. In her last moments, she made two requests: one, that he would build an imposing tomb for her; the other, that he would never marry again. He assented to both requests, and kept his word. His reign was the culminating period of the prosperity, power, and pomp of the empire. The gorgeousness of his state beggars description; but those terrible British, destined to overshadow and destroy it, were already beginning to get a foothold in India. Little, however, did the imperial mourner, Shah Jehan, heed them.

He at once set his architects at work, with twenty thousand laborers, to build over his lost Moomtaza a memorial worthy of her loveliness and of his grief. For twenty two years they toiled, when, at a cost equivalent to twenty million dollars now, unveiled from every disfiguring accompaniment, rose on the banks of the clear blue Jumna, at Agra, where it still stands to enchant the soul of every traveller who approaches, the Taj Mahul, the most exquisite building on the globe, an angelic dream of beauty, materialized, and translated to earth. It is a romance, at once of oriental royalty, of marriage, and of the human heart, that the unrivalled pearl of architecture in all the world should thus be a tomb reared over the body of his wife by the proudest monarch of the East.

Colonel Sleeman says, "Of no building on earth had I heard so much as of this; for over five and twenty years, I had been looking forward to the sight of it. And, from the first glimpse of the dome and minarets on the distant horizon, to the last glance back from my tent ropes to the magnificent gateway, I can truly say that every thing surpassed my expectations. After going repeatedly over every part, and examining the total view, from every position and in all possible lights, from that of full moon at midnight in a cloudless sky, to that of the noonday sun, the mind reposes in the calm persuasion, that there is an entire harmony of parts, a faultless congregation of architectural beauties, on which it could dwell for ever without fatigue; and one leaves it with a feeling of regret that he cannot have it all his life within his reach, and of assurance that the image of what he has seen can never be obliterated from his mind while memory holds her seat."

The quadrangle in which the structure stands is 964 feet one way, 329 the other. The area around is laid out in parterres, planted with flowers, blossoming shrubs, and cypresses, interlaced by rows of bubbling fountains, and avenues paved with freestone slabs. The mausoleum itself, the terrace, and the minarets, are all formed of the finest white marble, and thickly inlaid with precious stones. The funeral vault is a miracle of coolness, softness, splendor, tenderness, and solemnity. Fergusson, the historian of architecture, says, "No words can express the chastened beauty of that central chamber, the most graceful and the most impressive of all the sepulchres of the world." When, in that vault, before the two sarcophagi containing the bodies of Moomtaza and Shah Jehan, the priest reads the Koran in a sort of mournful chant, or an attendant plays with subdued breathings on a flute, the notes are borne up into the numerous arcades and domes, reduplicated, intermingled, dying away, fainter and fainter, sweeter and sweeter, until the ravished hearer, as he departs, can remember no more than that the sounds were heavenly, and produced a heavenly effect, making him feel, that, if to die were to listen for ever to those tones, death would be inconceivable bliss.

Russell, in his "Diary in India," thus records the impression the scene made on him: "Write a description of the Taj! As well write a description of that lovely dream which flushed the poet's cheek, or gently moved the painter's hand, as he lay trembling with delight, the Endymion of the glorious Art Goddess, who reveals herself and then floats softly away among the moonbeams and the dew clouds, as he springs up to grasp the melting form! Here is a dream in marble, the Taj: solid, permanent; but who, with pen or pencil, can convey to him who has not seen it the exquisite delight with which the structure imbues the mind at the first glance, the proportions and the beauty of this strange loveliness, which rises in the Indian waste, as some tall palm springs by the fountain in a barren wilderness? It is wrong to call it a dream in marble: it is a thought, an idea, a conception of tenderness, a sigh of eternal devotion and love, caught and imbued with earthly immortality. There it stands in its astonishing perfection, rising from a lofty platform of marble of dazzling whiteness, minarets, dome, portals, all shining like a fresh, crisp snow wreath. The proportions of the whole are so full of grace and feeling, that the mind rests quite contented with the general impression, ere it gives a thought to the details of the building, the exquisite screens of marble in the windows, the fretted porches, the arched doorways, from which a shower of fleecy marble, mingled with a rain of gems, seems about to fall on you; the solid walls melting and glowing with tendrils of bright flowers and wreaths of blood stone, agate, jasper, carnelian, amethyst, snatched, as it were, from the garden outside, and pressed into the snowy blocks. Enter by the doorway in front: the arched roof of the cupola soars above you, and the light falls dimly on the shrine like tombs in the centre of the glistening marble, see a winter palace, in whose glacial walls some gentle hand has buried the last flowers of autumn." In yon cenotaph, profusely covered with ornamental texts from the Koran, sleeps the lamented bride of the Indies. "Her lord lies beside her, in a less costly but loftier casket; and the two tombs are enclosed by a lattice of white marble, which is cut and carved as though it were of the softest substance in the world. A light burns in the tombs, and garlands of flowers are laid over the rich imitations of themselves. Hark as you whisper gently, there rolls through the obscure vault overhead a murmur like that of the sea on a pebbly beach in summer. A white bearded priest, who never raises his eyes from his book as we pass, suddenly reads out a verse from the Koran. Hark! How an invisible choir takes it up, till the reverberated echoes swell into a full volume of sound, as though some congregation of the skies were chanting their hymns above our heads. The eye fills and the lip quivers, we know not why: a sigh and a tear are the tribute which every heart that can be moved to pity, or has thrilled with love, must pay to the builder of the Taj."

Who that reads this tender romance of love and loss, pride and grief and peerless memorial, will not sometimes amidst enchanted recollections of Nala and Damayanti, Haroun Al Raschid and Zobeide, Shahriar and Scheherazade in his recurring thoughts allow a place for the imperfectly known but fascinating story of Shah Jehan and Moomtaza Mahul?

PLATONIC LOVE; OR, THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS.

IN the further consideration of these genial attachments of women with persons not of their own sex, we come to those whose relation is that of a wholly free and elective friendship, a friendship with no intermixture either of hereditary connections or of family obligations. This brings us directly to an examination of that species of affection celebrated through the world as Platonic love; on which so many false judgments, inadequate judgments, coarse judgments, have been pronounced by partial observers and critics. If, in this discussion of the relations of affection between men and women, delicate topics are handled, and some things said from which a squeamish reader may shrink, the vital importance of the matter and the motive of the treatment furnish the only needful apology. Prudery is the parsimony of a shrivelled heart, and is scarcely worthy of respect. The subject of the relations of sentiment and passion between the sexes has paramount claims on our attention. It actually occupies a foremost place in the thoughts of most persons. It is constantly handled in the most unrestrained banter on the stage and in all the provinces of fictitious literature. Almost every sensational tale reeks with vulgar portrayals of it. In the mean time, the reign of vice is thought daily to grow more common and more shameless; the demoralization of our great cities, in the flaunting openness of their profligacy, seems to be annually bringing them nearer to an equality with the debauched cities of pagan antiquity. The depravity of an abandoned life is supposed to gather constantly an enlarging class of victims, and to diffuse its undermining evils more widely around us. Shall the pulpit, the academic chair, the high court of the finer literature, alone be dumb? It is the duty of those clothed with the authority of wisdom and purity to speak in plain accents of warning and guidance. They are guilty of a wrong, if they let a mock modesty keep them silent on a matter so deeply imperilling the most sacred interests of the community.

Yet a word of protest is called for against those exaggerated sensational statements on this subject, so persistently forced on public attention by well-meaning but mistaken persons. A tendency has shown itself of late, in many quarters, to attribute that increase of sensual vices imagined to mark the age, not to temporary outward causes, provisional phases of our civilization, but to a growth of depravity in character, an intrinsic lowering of moral sanctions and heightening of foul passions in the people. Such a belief I hold to be both false in its basis and pernicious in its influence. To every competent student of human nature, history demonstrates a progressive diminution in the intensity of the physical passions, and a corresponding increase of moral sensibility and the power of conscience. The extension of sensual vice at the present time, if it be a fact, is owing to accidental conditions which will not be permanent, and is itself very far from being so common or so fearful as some alarmists think. Those alarmists are doing more hurt than good by their overdrawn descriptions and excited declamation. They are fastening a morbid attention on a morbid subject. There is an innocent ignorance, which, if dangerous in some cases, is, in many cases, the highest safety. There is a wholesome unconsciousness, a noble preoccupation with good and pure things, which is a far more promising protective from evil and its temptations than a keen scent and an eager notice of every tainted thing in the wind. If you choose the crow for your guide, you must expect your goal to be carrion. The travellers, who, after making the tour of the United States, write books taken up with the frequency of divorce among us, or devoted to such limited and exceptional aspects as that presented by the Mormon settlement at Utah, are not to be accepted as sound expositors of our social and moral condition. A De Tocqueville is a truer and more adequate teacher. Many recent writers on the relation of the sexes in the present age, writers belonging to the medical, priestly, and literary professions, appear to be infested with the suspicion that certain wicked and disgusting customs are almost universal. They seem occupied in looking everywhere to trace the signs of those customs. Their writings are less adapted to prevent or cure the deprecated evil than they are to fix a diseased gaze on it, and thus to aggravate its mischief. Their readers must get more harm than benefit from them. The belief in the exceptionality and the loneliness of vice is a restraint from it; the belief in its commonness is a demoralizing provocative to it. There are well-meant books now having a wide circulation in consequence of the efforts made to push them, which I cannot help believing do more injury than many books which are universally condemned. They give their readers the suspicion that the vilest forms of sensuality are universally prevalent, and induce in them the habit of looking for their signals in every direction. To every pure and lofty soul, such a suspicion and habit are enough to turn the sunshine into a stench and make the very landscape loathsome. The crowding of population in manufacturing and commercial centres, our thronged and exposed hotel-life, the expensive habits of fashion, the excessive luxury of wealth and vanity, are, undoubtedly, causes of much personal vice. But, notwithstanding all this, the vile and degraded men and women are the marked exception in every community among us. The vile and degraded are more segregated into a class by themselves, and are therefore more conspicuous and obtrusive than ever before. Licentiousness may have been more prevalent formerly than now, as I believe it was; but less prominent and less noticed, because of its greater diffusion. It was not so concentrated into relief. The unstainedly honorable and virtuous are the vast majority, and will, when a few evil conditions of society are outgrown, rapidly become an ever larger majority. Especially do I believe it to be a truth, which none but the ignorant or the vicious can question, that every city and village in America, outside of Mormondom, abounds with matrons and maidens, the face of any one of whom Purity herself might take for her escutcheon.

But, after we allow every just abatement from the overcharged representations of the extent of sensual vice in our time, there remains cause enough to make every lover of virtue anxious to employ all available means to lessen the force of social temptation and to increase the firmness Of individual resistance. And there cannot be a reasonable doubt that high-toned friendships of earnest men and women would be a holy and powerful restraint from illicit habits. To represent such attachments and intercourse as dangerous lures to evil, or, as a popular novelist of the day has called them, "delusions and snares," is an inversion of their true influence. Consider the following picture drawn by a young Frenchman from his own experience amid the exposures of Paris:

"The house of Julius Fontaine is another home for me; he and his wife are a family for me. When I am gay, I go to them to pour out my gayety; if I am sad, I go to them to have my grief consoled; they receive kindly both my joy and my sorrow. No fixed day nor hour of admission, no ceremony and grand toilet; they receive me when I arrive; they welcome rue in whatever costume I present myself. I enjoy to the utmost, with these good friends, the pleasure of being spoiled; I give myself up to it with delight. As soon as I enter, they install me in a comfortable arm-chair, in a choice situation in the corner of the fireplace. They speak to me of every thing that is interesting to Ime; they listen to all my nonsense; they give me advice, if I ask for it; they consult me about all they intend doing. I am initiated, by a lively conversation, into the most minute details of the household; they relate to me the little triumphs and misdeeds of the children, whom they caress or scold before me. If the hour arrives for the meal, my place is set; and, invited or not, there are sure to be on the table some dishes for which they know my preference. In playing with the children, in dreaming aloud, in talking seriously, sometimes in a little discussion or backbiting, in laughing, and exchanging those nothings which charm, we know not why, the hours glide away. I leave as late as possible; we give cordial grasps of the hand, which express our regret at parting. The next day, or a few days after, I find myself there with renewed pleasure. It seems as if each evening we become more necessary to one another. They almost make me forget that they are two, and that I am one."

Such a friendship must be a guardian guidance of virtue and happiness. The cultivation of such relations cannot be too strongly recommended. The odious vices of sensuality would die out before them. Profligacy either rots or petrifies the heart; but a pure friendship inspires, cleanses, expands, and strengthens the soul. It is the nutriment of genius and of every form of philanthropic virtue. "How can one who hates men love a woman without blushing?" is one of Richter's incisive questions.

In now taking up the subject before us, the meaning of the thing in debate should first be perceived; for, while the ignorant are always the least competent, they are often the most forward, to give decisions. Truly understood, the Platonic sentiment does not denote love, in the distinctive significance of that word, but a pure and fervent friendship. Ideal love is ordinary love taken up, out of material organs and relations, into pure mentality, with the preserved correspondence of all it had on that lower plane where it naturally lives. Platonic love is a high personal passion, like the former, with the exception that no physical influence of sex enters into it; imagination exalting the soul, instead of inflaming the senses. Actual love is the marriage of total persons for mutual happiness, and for the transmission of themselves in new beings. Ideal love is either the memory of actual love, or the notion of it prevented from becoming actual by some impediment. Platonic love is the marriage of souls for the production of spiritual offspring, ideas, feelings, and volitions. The first looks ultimately to the perpetuation of life by providing new receptacles for it; the last looks ultimately to the enhancement of life by a sympathetic reflection of it. The children of actual love are organic reproductions of the being of the parents; the children of Platonic love are spiritual reflections of the being of the parents. The perfected offspring of love are boys and girls; the perfected offspring of friendship are states of consciousness.

Love, in its high and pure forms, is confined to one object. Friendship has this advantage, that it may be given to all, however numerous, whose conduct and qualities of character are fitted to command it. It is, therefore, less perilous, less exposed to fatal wreck, more capable of consolations and replacements. Love and friendship are properly not antagonists, but coadjutors. They naturally go together where there is adaptedness for them, mutually quickening and increasing each other. The former should never exist without the ennobling companionship and clarifying mixture of the latter. But there are numberless instances in which, while the former is impossible, or would be wrong, the latter is abundantly capable of nurture, and would prove a boon of unspeakable solace.

Six immortal names will serve to set in relief the distinction between that impassioned friendship of man and woman which constitutes Platonic love, and those forms of ideal love which are often erroneously confounded with it.

The affection of Petrarch for Laura, after her death, was ideal love. The love which, in her life, had pervaded his system, then rose, strained of its carnal elements, and re-appeared in his mind alone, with the ideal equivalents of all it had before. She became a heavenly idea exciting emotions in him, instead of an earthly object productive of sensations; yet a correspondence of all that had been in the sensations was still seen, purged and eternized, in the emotions.

The affection for Beatrice which consecrated the soul of Dante was Platonic love, or a divine friendship. It was free from sensual ingredients from the first. It was his spirit, ruled by an intense sympathy, mentally confronting hers, as a live mirror before a live mirror; creating in his own, in correspondent states of consciousness, all the entrancing shapes of truth, beauty, and goodness he saw passing in hers, revealed from God, revealing God, and clothed with power to redeem the gazer from every thing corrupt. Dante promised to immortalize Beatrice by dedicating to her such a strain of love as had never before celebrated a woman. He kept his promise wonderfully. But the essence of his love was not a new creation; it was simply an ardent, sexless, worshipping friendship, that Platonic passion which, wholly cleansed from sense, adored a beautiful soul as a type of the Divine Beauty, a medium of celestial realities, which shone through it in half-veiled reminiscences. The originality of the Dantean love consists, first, in the unique personality of the poet, and the equally peerless personality which his genius has given to his lady; secondly, in associating and blending with the Platonic substance of that love the constituents and scenery of the Christian doctrines of God and the future life.

Abelard and Heloise began with ordinary friendship, in the relation of teacher and pupil. The extreme beauty, genius, and graces of the parties soon poured into their intercourse an intoxicating potion, which swept the senses into the mental whirl; and friendship fermented into love. After their misfortunes and separation, the love, refined from passion to memory, rose out of the senses into the thoughts, and circulated in idea, instead of detaching itself in act. We imagine Petrarch offering enamored tribute to Laura, who warmly persuades his homage, but coldly repels his ardor. We think of Abelard and Heloise in pensive converse, hand in hand, eye to eye, living over the past with tender regrets. But we see Dante kneeling before Beatrice, in profound humility and intellectual entrancement, touching the hem of her robe, while she points upward to the supernal Glory, whose light is falling on her face.

What distinguishes this Platonic affection from ordinary friendship is, that the magic of imagination, with a religious emphasis, is in it. What distinguishes it from love is, that the consciousness of sex has nothing to do with it, while that element is essential in the latter. If woman is generally the object to whom this affection attaches, it is not because she is woman, but because she is purer, lovelier, more self-abnegating, a clearer mirror of divinity. Precisely the same affection exists, when favorable conditions meet, between man and man; as is abundantly shown in the sonnets of Shakespeare, in the writings of Plato himself, and in many other places.

The type of affection now defined, many people consider a mere theory, spun by a finical fancy, incapable of reduction to practice in the substantial relations of life. But such critics criticise themselves. They identify their own limitations with the diagram of human nature. This is the procedure ever characteristic of arrogant folly, to make its actual experience the measure of possible experience. All beauty that is sufficiently marked, does, in its very nature, awaken a blessed ravishment in every soul that is sufficiently harmonious and sensitive. The charm operates to this result through the imagination. Now, if the imagination distribute the spell through the body, as well as through the soul, ordinary love is the consequence; but, if imagination be confined within the intellect, Platonic love is the consequence. Some persons, no doubt, are incapable of the latter; the instant any form of beauty strikes their perceptions, it is deflected downward, and dips into the senses. Every esthetic impression, even the loveliness of painting, music, or a soft landscape, affects them voluptuously. But it is an outrage for them to attribute this peculiarity of constitutional structure, or temperamental key, to everybody else. There are persons built after a nobler pattern, keyed to a loftier music, susceptible of a more undefiled and eternal stir of the atoms of consciousness. They look on a beautiful woman, with a delight circling purely in the mind, with a serene melodious joy, like that given them by an exquisite picture, statue, or landscape. Dante tells us, in his Vita Nuova, that he carried about with him a list of the loveliest ladies in Florence. To attach any prurient association to the act, would be blasphemy; it can only be understood by reference to that sweet, poetic, religious worship of lovely forms, which seems to rise through contemplation of beauty to adoration of God. One man, brought into intimate relation with an attractive and gifted woman, feels as if he were a vase of fiery quicksilver; another feels as if he were a mirror of divine ideas. The latter is capable of a friendship with her as fervent as love, but without its alloy; the former is not. St. Beuve says of Maurice de Guérin, "The sympathetic friendship of a beautiful woman appeased instead of inflaming him."

The exalted friendship of man and woman, known as Platonic love, is not, then, an empty mirage of sentimentality. But is it not too dangerous to be cultivated? Is it not liable to go too far, and to work fatal mischiefs? Many, judging from unworthy instances, With an inadequate knowledge of the data, answer these questions with a sweeping affirmative. But justice requires a careful discrimination. Unquestionably there are some who are unfit for this relation, in danger of perversion and betrayal at every step of its progress. Such should either shun the connection, or keep themselves with double guards of discreet reserve and watchfullness. Love and friendship, with them, are two electrical regions, insulated by a thin line of non-conduction. The more highly charged region tends, at the touch of any stimulative sign, to break through the barrier, and to flood the whole being with its own kind. For those of inflammable temperament and weak conscience, it is obvious enough what jeopardy must attend their playing about the conscious edges of relations on which such thunders of soul and fate hang, ready to be unleashed at a look. But there is another class of persons, with whom the fire of affection is harmless. Like those weird heat-lightnings that play in the firmament on summer evenings, it retains the lambent warmth and luminous loveliness, without the blasting violence. Of the intellectual and sensual regions, only the former is surcharged; the latter is either exhausted, or separated by an insulation so sure that it cannot possibly flash into the other. The unclean electricity of lust cannot find its way through the non-conductors of esteem, reverence, duty, and honor. Those are safe, who, shielded by such holy barriers, pay their worship, in the mental holy of holies, to the supernal charms of truth and virtue, to the dazzling sanctity of the principle of good. It is only the gross and weak who are discharged to their ruin by the lures of vice and pleasure. A profound reverence for a person at the same time inflames the soul and refrigerates the senses.

The common apprehension of danger from friendship between men and women is exaggerated. Those who fear such a danger should study the moral exaltation and the unspeakable usefullness and comfort of the friendship between Gunther, the court physician, and Matilda, the queen, depicted by Auerbach, with such careful truth, in his great novel, "On the Height." Friendship is more likely to spring from love than love from friendship, in all but degraded characters. Desire is unprincipled. Love rests on a basis of desire, and naturally fights against the obstacles that oppose its gratification. It is, therefore, taken by itself, essentially dangerous. But friendship rests on a basis of esteem. Esteem is the very voice and face of moral and religious principle, the essential enemy of low temptations. It is the clear cold signet with which the soul stamps a commanding veto against every vicious act. Whenever there is danger that friendship will become another passion, where there are legal or moral duties forbidding it, the true course is not to dismiss and denounce the friendship, but to preserve it in its undegenerate integrity, by strengthening the sanctions, restraints, and obligations that should properly guide and guard it. The element of sense and sex sometimes breaks out with horrible fury in the closest relations. The cruel crime of Hebrew Amnon, the dark tale of Italian Cenci, numerous Greek tragedies, many of the terrible English tragedies of Massinger, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Beddoes, furnish harrowing examples. The amours of the unworthy yield no better argument against profound and earnest friendships between men and women than the morbid cases referred to yield against the proper affection of parent and child, brother and sister. One does not refuse to exercise his mind for fear it will lead to insanity; but he takes care to exercise it healthily. So he should not repudiate the friendship of a woman, because it may lead to harm; he should cherish the friendship, and beware of the harm. It is a profanation to judge of the natural effect of intimacy with the innocent or the wise and virtuous from the effects of intimacy with the depraved and guileful. Poor, sinful Tannhauser, long enslaved in the Venusberg, yearned to be free from the degrading bonds of sensuality. Utterly vain were his agonizing prayers to Venus to release him. But when, with a sudden ardor of faith and resolve, he cried to the Virgin Mary, the grotto in which he was confined instantly faded away, with all its unhallowed seductions.

The degree of danger in these connections will always depend on the characters of the parties. We cannot lay down, as tests, general rules which have much value irrespective of particular persons. Jean Paul, at twenty-six, wrote a prize-essay on "How far Friendship may proceed with the other sex without Love, and the Difference between it and Love." The essay won the prize; but, if ever published, it is not contained in his collected writings. Probably the author's maturer judgment pronounced it of but little value. In one of the volumes of the "Southern Literary Messenger" there is a very pleasing tale, entitled "How far Friendship may go with a Woman;" arguing that it is sure to end in love. The same conclusion is also advocated with much spirit in "A Debate on Friendship," in the thirty-fourth volume of "Knickerbocker." The opposite and better view is gracefully and effectively maintained in an article entitled "De l'Amitie," in the fifteenth volume of "Harper's Magazine." Such special pleadings, however, will have slight weight with a sincere inquirer after the truth.

The most important principle for the guidance of such an inquirer is this: Friendship can be carried, without adulteration or peril, to a degree proportioned to the nobleness and consecration of the parties. It is shocking for those drawn together by a common pursuit of pleasures, to judge, by the standard applicable to themselves, those attracted towards each other by a common service of authorities. As a general rule, sensuality is in inverse ratio to intellectuality, but sensibility in direct ratio.

Accordingly, there is a select class of men and women, of the loftiest genius and character, the native haunt of whose souls is in the purest regions of nature and experience, who are made for friendship; and who, destitute of this, are deprived of their truest and fullest happiness. The movement of imagination which beauty starts in them keeps to the chariot-paths of celestial ideas, and is never switched into the burning tracks of sense. Friendship then reigns in sovereign distinction from love, sometimes by an unfittedness for the latter, sometimes by the interposition of moral principles and sentiments which lift their insulating behests as an impenetrable wall between the different regions.

One of the most striking of the testimonies borne to the value of the friendship of a woman is that of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton:

"It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuit or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtile delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgment, which ire rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing; for a woman Triend always desires to be proud of you. At the same time, her constitutional timidity makes her more cautious than your male friend. She, therefore, seldom counsels you to do an imprudent thing. By friendships I mean pure friendships, those in which there s no admixture of the passion of love, except in the married state. A man's best female friend is a wife of good sense and good heart, whom he loves, and who loves him. If he have that, he need not seek elsewhere. But supposing the man to be without such a helpmate, female friendship he must have, or his intellect will be without a garden, and there will be many an unheeded gap even in its strongest fence.

"Better and safer, of course, are such friendships, where disparities of years or circumstances put the idea of love out of the question. Middle life has rarely the advantage youth and age have. Moliere's old housekeeper was a great help to his genius; and Monaigne's philosophy takes both a gentler and loftier character of wisdom from the date in which he finds, in Marie de Gournay, an adopted daughter, 'certainly beloved by me,' says the Horace of essayists, with more than paternal love, and involved in my solitude of retirement, as one of the best parts of my being. Female friendship, indeed, is to a man the bulwark, sweetener, ornament, of his existence. To his mental culture it is invaluable; without it, all his knowledge of books will never give him knowledge of the world."

Mrs. Jameson quotes the opinion of Auguste Comte, that "the only true and firm friendship is that between man and woman, because it is the only one free from all possible competition." And she adds, "In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our conventional morality, or immorality, places men and women in such a relation socially as to render such friendships difficult and rare." Sydney Smith said, and the remark applies as forcibly to America as to England, "It is a great happiness to form a sincere friendship with a woman; but a friendship among persons of different sexes rarely or never takes place in this country." The strong jealousy felt in these countries for any intimate relations of affection between men and women other than fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives; the readiness to cast coarse insinuations on them, is more discreditable to our hearts than it is creditable to our morals. It implies the belief that they cannot be attached as spirits without becoming entangled as animals. It is absurd to pretend that the multiplication of virtuous friendships between the sexes would foster licentiousness. Their flourishes best in their absence. Their lifeelement, esteem, is death to licentiousness. A holy thought, with its train of vestal emotions, like Diana and her nymphs, hunts impure desire out of the blood. One of the most known and remarkable friendships of woman and man was that of the Pope Hildebrand and the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Their relation was based on veneration for each other's commanding and austerely virtuous characters, ardent sympathy in convictions, plans, dangers, labors, and sufferings. They were both supremely devoted to the Church, to the support of its creed, and to the extension of its power. An enthusiastic community in so much experience made them enthusiastic friends. The vile charges of impurity brought against them by their vulgar foes then, and repeated since by prejudiced historians, are a matter of indignation and disgust to every impartial judge.

The most persuasive recommendation of these friendships is seen in the class of persons who are their most distinguished cultivators and exemplars. Men overflowing with the tenderest sensibility, devoted to the loftiest ends, bravest to dare, firmest to suffer, quickest to renounce, studious, afflicted, holy, unconquerable souls, are the ones who put the highest estimate on the friendships of women; who instinctively seek to win the confidence and interest of the best women they meet; who are surest to surround themselves with a group of pure and noble women, from whose sympathy, through conversation and correspondence, they draw unfailing supplies of comfort, strength and hope. Find a person to whom a tender friendship is an absolute necessity, as it was to the classic De Tocqueville, who said, "I cannot be happy, or even calm, unless I meet with the encouragement and sympathy of some of my fellow-creatures," and you will never find him sneering at Platonic love. Klopstock, soul of ethereal softness and sanctity; Jean Paul, who added the finest heart of womanhood to the athletic soul of manhood; Richardson, so blameless in his life, so pathetic in his writings, so pleasing in his half naïve, half grandiose, personality; William Humboldt, the loving son and brother, the irreproachable statesman, the majestic scholar, the model of a Christian gentleman; Matthieu de Montmorency, hero and saint; Schleiermacher, the unflinching thinker and prophet, devout rouser, yearning comrade, encircled by Rahel Levin, Charlotte Von Kathen, Dorothea Veit, Henrietta Herz, and the rest; Charming, brave seeker and servant of truth, spotless patriot, lofty friend of humanity, burning aspirant to God, finest and grandest American character, these, and such as these, are the men who have most valued friendships with choice and unspotted women. On the other hand, the contemners of such a sentiment will be found most fitly represented by Thersites, who continued to ridicule Achilles for the tender- heartedness he showed towards the dead queen of the Amazons, until the hero killed the rancorous scoffer with one blow of his fist.

But, of all the class of men we have been speaking of, no one has more thoroughly tasted the contents of this relation in personal experience, or more completely mastered and displayed its secrets by psychological criticism, than Jacobi. Jacobi sat, for half his life, in the centre of a sort of Platonic academy of noble women, such as his own sisters, and the Princess Galitzin, Sophia Delaroche, and Cornelia Goethe, revolving, both in native feeling and critical thought, all the treasures of pure affection. Bettine, after a visit to him, said, "Jacobi is tender as a Psyche awakened too early." In his two works, "Allwill's Correspondence" and "Woldemar," he unfolds the true philosophy of Platonic love, in its psychological foundations and workings, and in all its subtilest ramifications, more fully than anybody else has ever done it. Jacobi held the glass before his own bosom, dipped the pen in his own heart, and drew the noble though fevered Woldemar after the life. The chief characters in this romance of philosophy and sentiment are Woldemar; his brother Biderthal, to whom he is passionately attached; Dorenburg; the three sisters, Caroline, Luise, and Henriette Hornich; and their dear neighbor and associate, Allwina Clarenau. Caroline and Luise marry Biderthal and Dorenburg; Allwina becomes Woldemar's wife; but Henriette becomes his friend. This friendship becomes so comprehensive and intense in its vitality, that life would be nothing to them without it. After a while, an element of strange perturbation and suspicion enters into it; they fear it is becoming love, and are most wretched. But at length, after much perplexity and distress, all comes clear; and they are again blessed with a perfect spiritual sympathy, as serene and pure as that between two seraphs.

The story and many of its separate incidents have been greatly censured and ridiculed; but Jacobi had an insight, a knowledge, a mastery, in these delicate matters, far superior to that of his critics. Whoso really fathoms his exposition must justify and admire it. The characters of Woldemar and Henriette are extraordinary and exceptional; they are nevertheless true; and their experience is accurately depicted, and offers an invaluable lesson for those who can read it. "I had, from a child," Woldemar writes, "a sweet lovingness for every thing which came in beauty towards my senses or my soul. I was full of pleasure, courage, and sadness. I bore something in my heart which divided me from all things; yea, from myself, I strove so earnestly to embrace and unite myself with all. But what made my heart so loving, so foolish, so warm and good, that I never found in any one. Before the rising and before the setting sun, under the moon and the stars, full of love and full of despair, I have wept as Pygmalion before the image of his goddess." After many vain trials to win a sufficing friendship, after long observation of others and study of himself, Woldemar concluded it unattainable, and laid the hope aside. "I found," he says, "that, collectively and singly, we nourish too many and too eager desires, are too deeply harassed by the pursuits, cares, joys, and pains of life, are too much tortured, excited, distracted, for two men anywhere, in these times, to become and remain so completely one as my loving enthusiasm had made me dream." But Henriette revived this long-forgotten dream in Woldemar, and made it real; and in his friendship we see carried out the idea of a man in whom a foreign personality has so overlaid and taken up his own, absorbing his will and determining his re-actions, that, in his relation to her, the element of sex is excluded, as it is in his relation to himself; and marriage with her would seem to him worse than incest.

The Duchess de Duras, in a letter to Madame Swetchine, expresses herself as being "indignant with the refinements of Woldemar,"

"The mixture of true and false, the combination of just reasoning with perverted sentiment. This love which is not friendship! and this friendship which is not love! Well, in the name of God, to love, is it not to love? Ah, Madame la Duchesse! do you think, then, that all the infinitely complicated minglings and windings of human feeling are so lucid and simple? Is Jacobi, the German Plato, so stupid a metaphysician and so low a moralist that you can so easily teach him acumen and ethics? Scorn or mirth is misdirected against him." Had Madame Swetchine read "Woldemar," we may be sure her verdict would have been different.

France has stood for a long time in advance of every other nation, in regard to the friendships of its men and women, pure as well as impure; it is a slander to limit them to the latter class. The reason of this is to be traced in historic causes, going back to the birth and dispersed influence of chivalry. Chivalry burst into its most gorgeous flower in Provence; Toulouse was the capital whence its light and perfume radiated through France. It spread thence into Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and other places; but nowhere reached the height and copiousness of power it had in the land of its origin. Its most fervent manifestation, at the summit of its state, was seen in the worship of woman, the chaste and enthusiastic homage paid by the knight to the lady of his choice. This ideal idolatry of woman, which played so dazzling a part in the poems of the minstrels and in the inner life and historic feats of the knights, subsided, in the gradual change of times, into delight in the society and conversation of woman. The peculiar combination of influences that presided over this process may be briefly indicated.

Few women at the present time appreciate the debt of honor and gratitude they owe to the troubadour or wandering minstrel of the early Middle Age. Moncaut has well revealed it in his "History of Modern Love." Feudal tyranny then held the whole sex in the sternest slavery. One day, the wife, or the young daughter, confined in the upper story of the walled fortress, sees, passing by the castle, a poor youth with a guitar suspended from his neck, humming a languishing air. She gazes on him; she hearkens to his song; she thanks him with a gesture and a smile. He has brought a momentary relief to the weariness of her sad captivity. Cast a glance on this roaming singer, this houseless rhymer; the last representative of that noble poesy born before Homer. This gentle son of poverty, seeking his bread with the strings of his viol, this Bohemian of the eleventh century, goes to regenerate barbarian society. The influence of music and poesy, which nothing mortal can resist, will win him permission in all places to sing what no one would dare to say. He will publish the sighs of woman for liberty, at a time when her life is an imprisonment; the prerogatives of love, its independence, when the father disposes of his daughter without deigning to consult her wishes or her vows. Before the ladies of the castles, he will celebrate the splendid deeds of the knights; before the knights, he will compassionate the tears and hardships of the ladies shut up in the castles; and thence will arise a double current of attraction and of sympathy between the oppressed women who suffer, and the generous men who long to deliver them.

But causes far deeper and wider than that of minstrelsy wrought in the favorable influence of chivalry on the condition of women, causes psychological, physiological, and social. The exalting effect of love is well known; its inciting and glorifying power is seen even in birds and beasts at the pairing-time, in a new brilliancy of plumage, and a wonderful increase of courage. Love produces a greater secretion of force in the brain and other nervous centres. This exuberance of spirit, or exaltation of function, is usually a transient phenomenon, the gratification of its impulses bringing its cause to a termination. It may, however, be made permanent by such an appropriation of the product as will re-act to keep the cause alive. That is to say, materialize a passion, and you destroy its power, its flame dies in the damps of indulgence; but spiritualize a passion, and you perpetuate its power, its flame becomes a spur, pricking the sides of intent.

The love of woman has in all ages given birth in man to passionate desires, poetic dreams, deferential attentions, persuasive forms of politeness; but only once in the whole of history has this softening, quickening, exalting power restrained from a destructive outlet, and stimulated to an unparalleled richness of manifestation, stamped with chastity by the dominant conscience and imagination of the time broken out in one great swell as an inspiration to glorious deeds, illuminating the world, and making an immortal epoch. Such, in one of its aspects, is the significance of chivalry, whose crest-wave broke into bloom in the Provencal literature; whose consummate flower, lifted far aloft, was Dante's homage to Beatrice. The inspiration of chivalry was the love of woman; but that love was spiritual. It aimed not at a personal union, to die away in marriage, but at a deathless fruition in heroic achievements. This ideal appropriation of love, to engender self-abnegating valor and beneficent deeds, originated from the meeting of the two currents of martial history and the Christian religion in a prepared people and period.

War was the chief institution and experience of man down to the Middle Age; Christianity had then become sovereign of the common beliefs and fears. The priests, who governed thought and conscience almost without check, were vowed to perpetual chastity; that was held up as the highest virtue. But gallantry has always marked the soldier. This element of military life, inoculated with the fire of imagination and the sanctity of the gospel, as happened in the poetic atmosphere of priestly and feudal Provence, was transformed into that pure, intense worship of woman which was sung by the Christian troubadours, and admired and emulated alike by lords, minstrels, and squires. For when the priesthood adopted the sons of war, and sent them forth under Christian sanctions, they naturally imparted to them, as far as possible, their own duties and sentiments. The result was the knight, with his lyre, cross, and sword, mixture of poet, warrior and saint; impersonating, in strange but beautiful union, the military, the literary, and the ecclesiastic ideal, in which the sensual flame fostered in the atmosphere of battle was blended with the mental purity nourished by the exercises of the cloister, and tempered with the rich fancy evoked under the stimulus of the academy. Chivalry was the child of martial adventure and religious faith, married by the culture of the Church. The gallant worship of woman native to the camp, the poetic worship of woman created in the court of minstrelsy, and the religious worship of woman set forth by the Church in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, blent in chivalry, produced that stainless and ardent devotion of the knight to his lady, which was appropriated as at once the incitement and the reward of brave and disinterested actions. Dipped in that pure pool of sentiment which the Angel of Christianity stirred, the darts of Cupid were cleansed from aphrodisiacs. The thought of a pure and lovely woman was then naturally allied with the thought of Divinity; the association of garter and star was not difficult.

The enthusiasm thus copiously generated, forbidden by the reigning spirit and circumstances of the age to escape, either through the vent of sensual indulgence, or through that of mere dreaming sentimentalism, was forced to flow forth in the only remaining channel, that of self-consecration to perilous adventures, glorious services, feats of toil and penance. When arms and knight-errantry fell out of fashion, in a more settled age, this force of enthusiasm, no longer flashing forth in warlike emprise, illumined the saloon; the current of feeling, instead of being directed upon the field, circled in the breast, and sparkled out in genial talk and graceful forms. The idolatrous devotion to woman, which had nerved the arm of the knight, and upheld chivalry, now subsided into a respectful sympathy with woman, and, animating the heart of the gentleman, became the ornament and sweetener of society, the inspiring basis of intercourse. In consequence of the stimulus and position resulting from the extreme honor paid to the great feudal dames and their beautiful sisters, in that palmy era, the higher class of women in France obtained a social development whose advantages they have never since lost.

France also had another period quite unique for the varied and wonderful development it gave to the genius and character of woman. An anonymous writer, in the English "National Review," has described this epoch in a passage of marked wisdom and brilliancy. "The court of France," he says, "in the reign of Louis XIII, the regency of Anne of Austria, and the early part of the reign of Louis XIV, produced a company of ladies, in whose presence all the remaining tract of history looks dim. Cousin has nobly drawn the portraits of their leaders. The wars of the League had left the great nobles of France in the enjoyment of an amount of personal freedom, importance, and dignity, greater than was ever before or since the lot of any aristocracy. Chivalrous traditions; the custom of appeal to arms for the settlement of personal quarrels, a custom which is said to have cost the country some nine hundred of its best gentlemen in about as many years; the worship of womanhood, carried to a pharisaical strictness of observance, were conditions, which, though socially disastrous in various ways, exalted the individual worth, power, and majesty of men to the most imposing height, and rendered a corresponding exaltation imperative upon the women, in order to secure that personal predominance which it is their instinct to seek. The political state of France was one which afforded the members of its court extraordinary occasions for the display of character. That state was one of a vast transition. Feudal privileges had to be either moderated, defined, and constitutionalized, or else destroyed. The revolution which was about to operate in England, and to end in liberty, was already working in France with a manifestly opposite destiny. Richelieu and Mazarin were slowly and surely bringing about an absolute despotism, as the only solution of the political difficulties of the State consistent with its greatness, and, probably, even with its unity. The opposition of the nobles to the diminution of their power was carried on with far greater boldness and grandeur of personal effect, inasmuch as it was done without directly affronting the monarchical authority in the persons of its weak representatives, Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria. The two great ministers were the objects against which the whole wrath of the nobility was directed. Hence the war against encroaching monarchy was in great part waged in the court itself; and the king and the queen- regent were themselves found from time to time in the ranks of the indignant aristocracy. Here, then, was a wonderful field for individual effect; and that field was open to women no less, or even more, than to men; for the struggle on the part of the latter was, upon the whole, a selfish and ignoble one. No national idea inspired it; every one was for himself and his house; and the women were perfectly able to sympathize and assist in quarrels of this personal and intelligible interest. In these days, too, rose Port-Royal, with its female reformers, saints, and theologians, offering an asylum to weary and repentant worldliness and passion, or a fresh field for vanity which had exhausted its ordinary irritants. On every side lay great temptations and great opportunities; and the women of the period seem to have been endowed with singular qualifications for the illustration of both."

The historic tradition of her great, lovely, brilliant, accomplished women is one chief reason why friendships of women with men are more common and important in France than in most other countries. Besides, the French are a more ideal people than others; live more from the brain, less from the spinal axis; take a deeper delight in the mere social reflection and echoing of life. And in this, on account of their instinctive swiftness of susceptibility, perception, and adroitness, refined women can have no rivals in the other sex. The luxury of the British is taciturnity; but to this day the favorite excitement of the French is conversation; and conversation is the food of friendship.

The inner history of the Catholic Church, so wealthy in many departments of experience, is especially rich in an original class of profound friendships of men and women, friendships between devout ladies and their spiritual directors. Without referring to the abuses which would sometimes occur in the instances of weak or sinister characters, these religious friendships have often been surprisingly permeating and transparent. This follows from the nature of the case. For the most ardent healthy devotees of religion are persons of the most exalted ideas and affections, most deeply endowed with the sensibility of genius. Every coarse passion both alien to their souls and awed away by the infinite realities they adore in common, the historic abyss of the Church scintillating around them with the memories and presences of saints, martyrs, angels, it is natural that all the purer sympathies of their being, enkindled and consecrated, should yearn together. The woman also confides every secret, unveils the inmost states of her spirit, to her confessor; takes counsel of him; holds with him the most confidential communion known outside of marriage. And the priest, in turn, shut out from the chief personal ties and vents of family, spontaneously bestows, so far as is blameless, his best human affections, turned back elsewhere, on the sister, daughter, mother, friend, fellow-worshipper, who looks up to him with such affecting trust, opening her heart to him, telling him her hopes and griefs, her errors, prayers, and fears. Madame de Sévigné, speaking of the attachment of women for their confessors, says, "They would rather talk ill of themselves than not talk of themselves." When pure and beautiful women, wonderfully dowered with spiritual charms, and noble priests, eminently possessed of every virtue and authority of character, so often meet, amid such inspiring circumstances, beneath the august sanctions of the church, drawn forward by the sublime mysteries of religion, and blending the potential perfections of heaven with the actual experiences of earth, it would be no less than a miracle if many friendships of singular sincerity and power did not spring up. They have sprung up in every part and period of Christendom; more in the Catholic Church than anywhere else, because its ritual and doctrine, its organized religious life and its practice of direction, furnish for them unequalled facilities and provocatives.

The friendship all divine which Jesus showed for many women, of whom Mary and Martha, the sisters of his friend Lazarus, are examples—the friendship which drew such matchless devotion from them, has been perpetuated in the Church in a relation of peculiar tenderness between the priest and the devotee.

"Many women followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him." With what godlike benignity he spoke to the Samaritan woman, to the Syrophenician woman, and to the poor adulteress! With what indescribable compassion he turned to the women who accompanied him towards Calvary, bewailing and lamenting him, and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me". And what words shall be set beside those which fell from his lips when, as he hung on the cross, he saw his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved, and he saith unto his mother, "Woman, behold thy son!" then he saith to the disciple, "Behold thy mother!" Verily, from that hour, the Church has taken woman to itself, as the recipient of a ministration full of respect and purity. In any enumeration of renowned ecclesiastical friendships, Saint Chrysostom and Saint Olympias, the gold-mouthed bishop of Constantinople and the rich and noble widow, deserve to head the list. Under the guidance of the eloquent preacher, she labored to perfect herself in the religious life, and gave her time and wealth to all kinds of charity and good works. From her Christian affection he drew precious strength and comfort. When he was carried from his church and driven into exile, the weeping Olympias fell at his feet, and clasped them so closely that the officers had to use force in tearing him from her. Sixteen letters addressed to her by Chrysostom during his banishment are still extant, silently pronouncing her eulogy throughout the Christian world. A friendship like the foregoing, only still more complete, was that of Saint Jerome and Saint Paula. The talents, scholarship, services, and enthusiasm of Jerome are universally known; and the chief personal attachment of his life is scarcely less familiar to the public. Paula, immortalized not less in literary history as his friend than in the ecclesiastical calendar for her virtues, was one of the most distinguished women of the age. She had great riches and high rank, as well as pronounced talents and worth. The blood of the Scipios, of the Gracchi, and of Paulus Emilius, met in her veins. Jerome was her spiritual director at Rome for two years and a half-her other soul while life remained. She built and supported at her own expense an extensive monastery for Jerome and his monks at Bethlehem. When she died, Jerome wrote to her daughter the long and celebrated letter called "Epitaph of Paula," in which he exhausts the hyperboles of praise. The features of a rare character and the proofs of an extraordinary affection may be discerned within the extravagances of this eloquent panegyric. The tombs of Jerome and Paula are still to be seen side by side in the monastery at Bethlehem. Saint Clara of Assisi, on account of her high rank, great wealth, and extreme loveliness, had many offers of marriage, many temptations to enter into the gayeties and luxuries of the world. But she preferred the thorny path of mortification and the crown of celestial beatitude. The melting pathos of the preaching of Saint Francis, with the penetrative charm of his spirit, drew her to throw herself at his feet and supplicate his guidance. He approved her desire to devote herself wholly to the religious life in seclusion; and, when she had made her escape by night from the proud castle, clad in her festal garments, and with a palm-branch in her hand, he and his poor brotherhood met her at the chapel-door, with lighted tapers and hymns of praise, and led her to the altar. Francis cut off her long golden hair, and threw his own penitential habit over her. She became his disciple, daughter, and friend, never wavering, though exposed to dangers and trials of the severest character. Under his direction, she formed the famous order of Franciscan nuns, afterwards named from her the Poor Clares.

These nuns, clad in gowns of gray wool, knotted girdles, white coifs and black veils, engaged in touching works of humility and charity, have been seen in many nations now for seven centuries, keeping alive the example of their foundress. When the body of Saint Francis, on its way to burial, was borne by the church of San Damiano, where Clara and her nuns dwelt, she came forth with them weeping, saluted the remains of her friend, and kissed his hands and his garments. The memory of the relation of these sainted friends is perpetuated in many pictures of the Madonna, wherein Clara is portrayed on one side of the throne of the Virgin, and Francis on the other, both barefooted, and wearing the gray tunic and knotted cord emblematic of poverty. Perhaps the most fervent and interesting of all the friendships between director and devotee, of which the documents have been published, is that of Saint Francis of Sales and Madame de Chantal. Full materials for studying this relation are furnished in the letters that passed between the parties, both of whom were of a temperament strung to the most exquisite tones of consciousness, with minds both wise and strong, and with characters under the control of austere principles of duty and piety. Michelet, in his work on the Confessional, gives a skilful and forcible picture of this rapt friendship; but his own pervading sensuousness, not to say sensuality, does the sentiment gross injustice by mixing in it so much of flesh and earth. The union of these two mystics in spirit and deed was as taintless as that of two angels in heaven.

If throbs of agonizing passion sometimes mounted up, the invariable heroism with which they were veiled and suppressed simply adds the martyr merit to the saintly one. Saint Francis had an irresistible attractiveness of figure and face, a temper and bearing of singular sweetness. Childlike, and so fair in appearance that it was difficult to withdraw the eyes from him, he united the greatest social insight and skill with the greatest sincerity and simplicity. Madame de Chantal, early left a widow, with several children and an aged and infirm father, administered the business of her household with systematic prudence, and filled her leisure hours with fervent religious exercises. Saint Francis and Madame de Chantal seem to have been predestined for friends. Their biographers relate, that, long before they had seen each other, they met in mystical visions and ecstasies. Archbishop Fremiot, brother of Madame de Chantal, and an intimate acquaintance of Saint Francis, invited him to preach at Dijon. During his sermon, the preacher noticed one lady particularly above the rest; and, as he came down from the desk, asked, "Who is that young widow who listened so attentively to the word?" The archbishop replied, "That is my sister, the Baroness de Chantal." An inspired understanding appears to have at once united their minds. "It is enchantment," Michelet says, "to read the vivacious and delightful letters which open the correspondence of Saint Francis with his dear sister and dear daughter. Nothing can be more pure, nothing can be more ardent." He says the sentiment she awakened powerfully assisted his spiritual progress. He thought of her at the moment of partaking of the sacrament. "I have given you and your widowed heart and your children daily to the Lord, in offering up his Son." She dispensed with her former confessor, and confided her spirit to Saint Francis. She desired to take the conventual vows; but he restrained her a long time. In the name of his mother, he gave her his young sister to educate.

This occupation tranquillized her mind; but the beloved child soon died at her house, in her arms. She prayed God "to take her own life, or one of her children, in place of her dear pupil." Saint Francis now consented that she should withdraw from the world. Her household presented a piteous scene-her old father and father-in-law in tears; her son, afterwards the father of Madame de Sévigné, prostrating himself on the threshold to prevent her departure. But the passionate response in her to the supposed call of Heaven broke all lower ties; and she passed over the body of her son, and said farewell for ever to her home. Saint Francis intrusted her with the formation of a new religious order—the celebrated Order of the Visitation. In nurturing this order, writing, travelling, praying in its interests, with intervals of silent retreat, she spent the rest of her days. Her intense temperament, her absolute faith and submission, her systematic attention to business, her mystical ecstasies, her heroic sacrifice, form a most original combination. Her life seems an alternation of sober processes, stormy raptures, and stifling calms. Her restless sensibility, girdled by fixed principle, gives us the picture of a sea of fire breaking on a shore of frost. Her essay on "Desire and the Agony of Disappointment" is a gush forced from the bottom of a heart full of baffled feeling, under the pressure of a mountain of pain. The constancy and power of her attachment to Saint Francis, through all, are marvellous. On the day of his mother's death, he writes, "I have given you the place of my mother in my memorial at the mass: now you hold in my heart both her place and your own." She writes to him, "Pray that I may not survive you." Twenty years did she outlive him; finding, to the last, her greatest pleasure in remembering him, carrying out his wishes, and corresponding about him with his friends. Ten years after the death of Saint Francis, Madame de Chantal had his tomb opened in the presence of her community, and made an address before the embalmed body. A testimony to the deep impression their friendship had made is found in the myth, that, when on this occasion she reverently lifted to her head the dead hand of the saint, it acknowledged her devotion by an answering caress. The winning qualities of Madame Guion awakened an enthusiastic interest in many of those whom her remarkable religious experience brought into close relations with her. Especially they produced in her confessor, Father Lacombe, such a ruling admiration, reverence, and tenderness, that he was subdued into a caricature of her. He followed her everywhere, could not dine without her, made her directions his law. When her peculiar doctrines of the Quietist life, and her fame, had caused a disturbance in the Church, her enemies circulated scandals about the friends. The spotless and heavenly-minded woman smiled, and paid no heed to the wrong. But Father Lacombe, under the combined power of his Quietistic fanaticism, poor health, bitter persecutions, and relentless imprisonment, lost the balance of his mind altogether, and died. Fenelon also, interested in Madame Guion by her genuine piety, and by sympathy with many of her views, and finding this interest greatly deepened on personal acquaintance, formed a strong attachment for her. Convinced of her innocence, and knowing her rare worth, the misfortunes and sufferings brought on her by her persecutors served but to redouble his kindness. Her enemies then became his; and they made him pay dearly for his fidelity, by robbing him of waiting honors, and throwing him into disgrace at court.

His friendship for Madame Guion was like that of a guardian angel. It never failed. One can imagine what her feelings towards him must have been. Many noble women had a strong friendship for Fenelon. He could not come into the confiding relations of his office with them without that result. His face was all intelligence and all harmony; his voice, music; his manner, fascination; his character, heaven. His unconscious suavity, his abnegated personality, formed a mighty magnet; and every soul, with any steel of nobleness in it, fondly swayed to him. Madame Maintenon gave him, for years, all the reverence and affection of which her commonplace nature was capable; and then, at the command of her selfish bigotry, became chilled. The impassioned and unhappy La Maisonfort, so talented and so beautiful, whose pathetic story is charged with every element of romance, adored him. And the Duchess de Chevreuse and the Duchess de Beauvilliers always paid him an homage whose grace and sweetness the happiest man that ever lived might well sigh for. To the latter of these queenly women, then a sorrowing widow, he wrote, in the last letter he penned, "We shall soon find again that which we have not lost: every day we approach it with swift strides; yet a little while, and there will be no more cause for tears." Among the penitents of Bossuet, there was one—a widow, named Cornuau, to whom the great prelate gave more of his heart than to any of the rest. In submitting her spiritual life to his oversight, they were often brought together, both by letters and by personal interviews. The affectionate docility and loyalty of the novice won his kind esteem, and the condescending benignity and greatness of the noble genius kindled her enthusiasm. And so the opposite ends of the chain of their attachment were fastened. After displaying exemplary zeal, for fifteen years, in all the works of duty assigned her, she was permitted to become a nun, taking the name of Bossuet in addition to the title of Sister Saint Benigne. Despite her humble origin and the mediocrity of her intellect, Bossuet preferred her above all the high-born and brilliant ladies who constantly knelt for his benedictions. It was only natural, that, notwithstanding the work of grace, she should sometimes feel jealous. But once, after she had expressed herself "ready to burst with jealousy" of a certain great lady, whom she falsely supposed esteemed more than herself by the lofty director, when the object of her jealousy was smitten with a frightful disease, Sister Benigne, with sublime self-sacrifice, went to Paris, and became her nurse; "shut herself up with her, watched over and loved her." When Bossuet died, La Cornuau, "happily guided by her friendship, forgetting her own vanity, and mindful only of the fame of her spiritual father, did more for him, perhaps, than any panegyrist." She published the two hundred letters he had written to her, "noble letters, written in profound secrecy, never intended to see the light, but worthy of exposure to the perusal of the whole world."

A friendship, such as we might suppose would be characteristic of such ecstatic natures, was cherished between the two celebrated Spanish mystics, Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross. The fullest expressions of it may be found in their respective writings, now translated into many languages, and easy of access almost anywhere. Unquestionably there have been very numerous Friendships, worthy of notice, between clergymen and devout women, in the Protestant sects. But they are different from those in the Catholic communion, which has, in this respect, great advantages. In the Protestant establishment, all are on a free equality; and the religion is an element fused into the life. With the Catholics, the overwhelming authority of the Church invests the priests with godlike attributes; while celibacy detaches their hearts from the home and family, leaving them ready for other calls. The laity are placed in a passive attitude, except as to faith and affection, which are more active for the restrictions applied elsewhere; and religion is pursued and practised as an art by itself. The church ritual, by its dramatic contents and movement, peerless in its pathetic, imaginative power, intensifies and cleanses the passions of those who appreciatively celebrate or witness it, and who are naturally attracted together, as, in blended devotional emotions and aims, they cultivate that supernatural art whose infinite interests make all earthly concerns appear dwarfed and pale.

The instances already cited of the friendships thus originating suffice to indicate the wealth in this kind of experience which must remain for ever unknown to the public. But one example which has just been brought to light, and is worthy to rank with the best of earlier times, should be mentioned here. It is the relation of Madame Swetchine and the most renowned preacher of our century, Lacordaire. This friendship has been beautifully portrayed by Montalembert. A full account of it will be found farther on in these pages. The friendship that joined the souls, and still links the names, of Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo, is one of the most celebrated in history. Her married life with the chivalrous and magnificent Marquis of Pescara, in his palace on the bewitching isle of Ischia, was one of the most romantically happy unions ever known; and nothing could be more noble than her impassioned fidelity to his memory. It was in the twelfth year of her widowhood that she first met with Michael Angelo, then sixty-three years old. Such were their respective attributes of personal worth and majesty, rank and fame, exaltation of character and genius, stainless purity, dignity, earnestness, and devotion, that they could not fail to regard each other with ardent esteem. For ten years, till death separated them, this esteem, with a consequent sympathy and happiness, steadily grew. To her he dedicated many works of his chisel and his pencil, and addressed several exquisite poems.

Their example affords a fine illustration of the sentiment of Platonic love; and his verses repeatedly give it a rhetorical expression equally fine. He says,

Better plea
Love cannot have, than that, in loving thee,
Glory to that eternal Peace is paid,
Who such divinity to thee imparts
As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies
With beauty, which is varying every hour.
But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power
Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower,
That breathes on earth the air of Paradise.

Vittoria said, "He who admires only the works of Michael Angelo values the smallest part in him." One of the only two portraits he ever painted was hers. The aged Angelo stood by the couch of Vittoria at her death. When the last breath had gone, "he raised her hand, and kissed it with a sacred respect." It is touching to know, that the sublime old man, years afterwards, recalling that scene to a friend, lamented, that, in the awe of the moment, he had refrained from pressing his lips on those of the sainted Colonna. Hermann Grimm says, "How great the loss was which he sustained can be realized only by him who has himself felt the void which the removal of a superior intellect irretrievably leaves behind it. It must have been to him as if a long-used, magnificent book, in which he found words suiting every mood, had been suddenly closed, never to be re-opened. Nothing can compensate for the loss of a friend who has journeyed with us for many years, sharing our experiences. Vittoria was the only one who had ever fully opened her soul to him. What profit could he draw from the reverence of those who would have ceased to understand him, had he shown himself as he was in truth? His only consolation was the thought, that his own career was near its close."

Among the celebrated French women, who have had a genius and a passion for friendships, Mademoiselle de Scudéry deserves prominent mention. Her great talents, virtuous character, and affectionate disposition, made her a favorite in the distinguished society she frequented. The great Conde, Madame de Longueville, and the other famous visitors of the Hotel Rambouillet, honored her, and took delight in her companionship. Her ardent devotion to her friends, her beautiful and heroic fidelity to them, her chivalrous vein of sentiment and character, Cousin has illustrated with his minute learning and generous eloquence. Why Madame de Longueville was in disgrace with the court party, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, with a fearless and noble constancy, dedicated a book to her, and, in consequence, lost her pension, and had to write for her bread. For this her aristocratic friends, instead of forsaking her, admired and clung to her the more. Her famous work, the "Grand Cyrus," in ten thick volumes, to which Cousin has brought to light a complete key, is filled with disguised portraits of her friends and associates, and with descriptions of the times.

She draws her own likeness under the name of Sappho. In this work, the pictures, incidents, and conversations reflect a state of society, in which "the degrees and shades of friendship, from deep Platonic love to the slight impression one person makes on another at first meeting, are the real pre-occupations of existence; the smallest grace of mind or manner is observed, and of importance; there is an intense epicurism in companionship; it is both the first occupation and the greatest pleasure of life." The second edition of an English translation of the whole ten volumes of the "Grand Cyrus" was published in London in 1691. The translator, F. G., Esq., erroneously attributes the authorship to "that famous wit of France, Monsieur de Scudéry, Governour of Nostre-Dame." He confounds the sister with the brother. It is dedicated to Queen Mary, wife of William of Orange, in a style of sonorous pomp, worthy of the court of Nadir Shah. In his preface, F. G. says, "If you ask what the subject is; 'Tis the Height of Prowess, intermixed with Virtuous and Heroick Love; consequently the language lofty, and becoming the Grandeur of the Illustrious Personages that speak; so far from the least Sully of what may be thought Vain or Fulsom, that there is not anything to provoke a Blush from the most modest Virgin; while Love and Honour are in a seeming Contention which shall best instruct the willing ear with most Delight." In describing the deep and rare friendships with which the "Grand Cyrus" abounds, Mademoiselle de Scudéry had but to look into her own heart, and make copies from her experience. Especially might the union of Sappho and Phaon stand for the picture of her own connection with Pélisson." The exchange of their thoughts was so sincere that all those in Sappho's mind passed into Phaon's, and all those in Phaon's came into Sappho's. They told each other every particular of their lives; and so perfect was their union, that nothing was ever seen equal to it. Never did love join so much purity to so much ardor. He wished for nothing beyond the possession of her heart. They understood each other without words, and saw their whole hearts in each other's eyes." Pélisson was twenty-nine, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry forty-five, when they first met. Their instant mutual interest deepened, on more thorough acquaintance, into the warmest esteem and affection, and remained unshaken for over forty years. The perfection of their intimacy was known to every one; and every one believed in its entire purity. Cousin says it is touching to see these two noble persons made so happy by their friendship, a friendship which even the coarse and slanderous Tallement respected so much that he refrained from casting a single sneer at it. The story of Pélisson's imprisonment in the Bastile is known to the whole world by the anecdote of the spider.

His only companion, during those wretched years, was a large spider, which he had tamed, and was accustomed to feed and play with. One day, the brute of a jailer trod on him, and killed him; and Passon wept. His friend employed all her ingenuity, during his confinement, in inventing means of communication with him. "At times, when he was ready to fall into despair, a few lines would reach him, and bring him comfort." At length his prison was opened, and fortune smiled again. At his death, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, though eighty-six years old, wrote and published a simple and affecting memoir of him, paying a deserved tribute to his character, in which, she said, there reigned a singular and most charming combination of tenderness, delicacy, and generosity. The most constant among the large circle of admiring friends drawn around Madame de Sévigné by her merits and charms was a cultivated Italian gentleman named Corbinelli, who lived in Paris, on a moderate income, asking only leisure, and the gratification of his high tastes. He was "one of those rare exceptions who seem created by nature to be the benevolent spectators of human events, without taking any part in them beyond that of observation and interest for the actors." He had talents equal to the greatest achievements, but was indolent and unambitious.

He was one of the earliest to discern and to proclaim Madame de Sévigné's exquisite superiority of mind, disposition, and manners, and to pay reverential court to her. Lamartine gives this account of the friendship that ensued—an account not less instructive than interesting: "His admiration, his worship, which sought no return, gained him admittance to her house, where he was regarded as one of the family, and became a necessary appendage. Madame de Sévigné, at first charmed by his wit, afterward touched by his disinterested attachment, concluded by making him the confidant of her most secret emotions. Every heart that beats warmly beneath its own bosom seeks to hear itself repeated in that of another. Corbinelli became the echo of Madame de Sévigné's mind, soul, and existence. He participated in her adoration of her daughter. At Paris, he visited her every day: he sometimes followed her to Livry; and, when absent, corresponded with her frequently.

"The dominion which his friend exercised over him was so gentle, that he experienced no feeling of slavery while submitting 'implicitly to the rule of her tastes. So absolute was her empire, that, when she became a devotee, he became a mystic: he followed her, as the satellite accompanies the planet, from the worldly gayeties of her youth, even to the foot of the altar, and the ascetic self-denial of Port-Royal. He survived her, as though he had survived himself, and lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred and four years, animated to unusual life by his gentle and amiable feelings. Such was Madame de Sévigné's principal friend. If his name were erased from her letters, the monument would be mutilated." La Rochefoucauld, whose reputation the indignant eloquence of Cousin has so damaged, was the object of an admiring friendship, of which he was not worthy, from Madame de Sévigné and Madame de la Fayette. But of all the friends to whom the ardent, imaginative, faithful heart of Madame de Sévigné attached itself, no one, after her husband and her daughter, held so commanding a place as Fouquet, the unfortunate minister of Louis XIV. Fouquet must have had rare traits, besides his acknowledged greatness of mind, to have won such a pure and unconquerable affection. Cast down from power, disgraced, closely imprisoned for fifteen years in the fortress of Pignerol, scoffed at by those who had fawned on him in his prosperity, and forgotten by nearly all whom he had befriended, never did Madame de Sévigné forget him, or cease, for one day, her efforts to alleviate his condition— cheering him with letters, and toiling to secure his liberation. D'Alembert had a long and sedulously improved friendship with Madame du Deffand, of whom Henault said, "Friendship was a passion with her; and no woman ever had more friends, or better deserved them."

There was a basis for this eulogy; but it needs much qualification. She and D'Alembert prized each other's society highly, and passed much time together. But jealousy and exaction are tenacious occupants, easily recalled to the heart even of an aged and friendly woman. When D'Alembert formed a closer friendship with Mademoiselle Lespinasse, the young and charming companion of Madame du Deffand, the latter imperiously dictated the renunciation of the new friend as the condition of retaining the old. The superiority of temper, genius, and worth in Mademoiselle Lespinasse did not permit D'Alembert to hesitate; and she repaid him with memorable fidelity. The affectionate and dependent girl was harshly driven out. In her anguish, she took laudanum, but not with a fatal result. D'Alembert then called Du Deffand an old viper; but his friend checked him, and would never allow any abuse of her former mistress, much less herself indulge in vituperation of her. When D'Alembert was attacked by a malignant fever, she went to his bedside, and nursed him day and night till he was convalescent. Marmontel says, "Malice itself never assailed their pure and innocent intimacy." She afterwards formed an attachment, of the most romantic character, to the young Spanish Marquis de Mora, who reciprocated her affection with impassioned ardor. He died while on the road to join her; and she was not long in following him into the grave, though, in the mean time, a still stronger passion for Guibert had weaned her from D'Alembert. The fervent tenderness of the latter for her remained unaltered, and he was inconsolable at her departure. On hearing of her death, Madame du Deffand said, "Had she only died fifteen years earlier, I should not have lost D'Alembert." Her letters are famous in the literature of love. Sir James Mackintosh says, "They are, in my opinion, the truest picture of deep passion ever traced by a human being." Margaret Fuller writes, "I am swallowing by gasps that cauldrony beverage of selfish passion and morbid taste, the letters of Lespinasse. It is good for me. The picture, so minute in its touches, is true as death." Madame de Staël had many devoted friendships, as would naturally be expected from the overwhelming wealth and ardor of her nature. Affinity of genius and a common love of liberty drew Benjamin Constant and her into intimate relations; and she maintained for years still closer relations with the all-knowing, all-cultured August Schlegel, whose devouring egotism and ever-sensitive vanity put all her patience and generosity to the proof.

The current opinion concerning Madame de Staël, that she was an exacting and disagreeable woman, is unjust. Schiller, who shrank from her impetuous eloquence, and Heine, whose reckless satire depicts her as going through Europe, a whirlwind in petticoats, both do her wrong. William von Humboldt, who knew her well, pronounces a glowing eulogy on her exalted traits, and says that Goethe, from prejudice and ignorance, was very unjust to her. Madame Mole says, "Women are not half grateful enough to Madame de Staël for the honor she conferred upon her sex by taking up the noble side of every question, armed with her pen and her eloquence, and never once calculating what the consequences might be. As time goes on, and details sink into insignificance, she will rise as the grand figure who withstood Bonaparte at the head of six hundred thousand men, with Europe at his back. His vanity was such that he could not bear one woman should refuse to praise him; for that was her only guilt." She was capable of the utmost magnanimity and disinterestedness. Every exalted sentiment struck a powerful chord in her heart. She lived in justice, freedom, beneficence, love, aspiration. The friendship of Matthieu de Montmorency, the most intimate and devoted of all her friends, is enough to prove her exalted worth, making every abatement for her acknowledged foibles. This chivalrous nobleman came, in his youth, to America with Lafayette, and fought for the new Republic. Although one of the foremost members of the aristocracy, it was on his motion in the Constituent Assembly that the privileges of the nobility were abolished. Sympathy in opinions and in the generous strain of their characters was the basis of a connection between him and Madame de Staël, that constantly grew in strength with the trials to which it was subjected, and was not severed even by death. When his brother, ardently loved, fell under the axe of the Revolution, it was her delicate sympathy, her ingenious and indefatigable goodness, that first soothed his anguish, assuaged the horror that threatened his reason, and prepared the way for religion and peace. And in turn, when she was exiled by Napoleon, Montmorency journeyed to Switzerland to visit her, at the risk of being banished himself, as he immediately was. "Matthieu, the friend of twenty years, is the most faultless being I have ever known." "How could he think I should tarry in Germany, when, by leaving it, I had a chance of seeing him? All Germany could not pay me for the loss of two days of his society." No unkindness, suspicion, or ignobleness of any sort, ever interrupted or mixed in the affection of these high friends. When Montmorency died, suddenly, in church, years after the death of Madame de Staël, the daughter of the latter, the Duchess de Broglie, instinctively exclaimed, on hearing of the event, "Ah, my God! I seem to see the grief of my poor mother." The prejudice in England and America against friendships between men and women has operated considerably to lessen their frequency, still more to keep them from public attention when they do exist. Undoubtedly, many a charming English woman, many a charming American woman, in her time the centre of the social circles of fashion, letters, and politics, has been surrounded by a company of friends as devoted at heart as those who have gathered with more public homage about the famous dames of France and Germany. Such groups will be called to mind by the English names of Mrs. Montagu, Lady Melbourne, Lady Holland; the American names of Mrs. Madison, Mrs. Hamilton, Mrs. Seaton, Mrs. Schuyler, and many others. But, since, with the most of these latter, the details have not been taken from the category of private property, by publications of memoirs and journals, it would be impertinent to single them out for personal mention, even where it is possible.

Magdalen Herbert, mother of George Herbert, befriended Dr. Donne in his distresses, ministering to the wants of his family with generous delicacy, and comforting him by her society. His discernment of her wit and piety, her gracious and noble disposition, combined with his gratitude to make him her fast and fervent friend. His conversation, together with that of Bishop Andrews, whose renown Clarendon and Milton unite to swell, appears to have given Lady Herbert great delight. Lasting evidence of the impression her character and kindness made on him is found in his verses and letters addressed to her, and in the funeral sermon which, with many tears, he preached for her. He says in verse, in her advancing age,

No spring nor summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen on an autumnal face.

And he gratefully writes to her in his quaint prose, "Your favors to me are everywhere. I use them and have them. I enjoy them at London and leave them there, and yet find them at Mitcham. Such riddles as these become things inexpressible; and such is your goodness." There was a choice, ever-comforting, and sacred friendship between the great John Locke and the excellent Lady Damaris Masham, the only daughter of that ornament of the English Church, the learned and benignant Cudworth.

She was one of the most gifted, cultivated, and elegant women of her time. The genius and moral worth of Locke are well known to all. Domesticated in the family of Lady Masham for many years before his death, giving her all the advantage of his talents, acquirements, and sympathy, "she returned the obligation with singular benevolence and gratitude, always treating him with the utmost generosity and respect; for she had an inviolable friendship for him." She watched by him in his last illness. He asked her to read a psalm to him. As death approached, he desired her to break off reading, and in a few minutes breathed his closing breath. She wrote the fine sketch of his character published in the "Historical Dictionary." She says his manners made him very agreeable to all sorts of people, and nobody was better received than he among those of the highest rank. "His greatest amusement was to talk with sensible people, and he courted their conversation." The amiable, unfortunate Cowper, the most shrinking and melancholy of men, too gentle and too unworldly for common companionship, was especially fitted for the soothing ministrations and the healing sympathy of women. He was dependent on these friendships, and found his chief happiness in them. But for them, his career would have been as brief as it was wretched; and his name, now haloed with such sadly pleasing attractions, would have had no place in English literature, except in the dark list of madmen and suicides. Who that has read his matchless lines on his mother's picture will not bless the good women who shed so many rays of peace and bliss on his unhappy lot. His cousin, the angelic Lady Hesketh, whose disinterested tenderness lavished grateful attentions on him, with a sweet skill that failed neither in his youth nor in his age, was as a light from heaven on his path through the whole journey. Some touching verses, and innumerable references in his letters, attest his appreciation of her. Mrs. Throckmorton and her husband, in whose grounds he loved to walk, and in whose kindly and refined society he spent so many delightful hours, furnished a healthy relief from the gloom of his austere religion, in the atmosphere of their genial catholicity; and were an invaluable comfort and benefit to him. Lady Austen also, a sprightly and accomplished woman, of intellectual tastes, quick sympathies, and charming manners, whose appearance at Olney "added fresh plumes to the wings of time," was at one period an inexpressible blessing to him. "Lady Austen's conversation acted on Cowper's mind as the harp of David on the troubled spirit of Saul." He christened her "Sister Ann," and wrote cordial verses to her. Constant communications with her withdrew his attention from depressing superstitions, and enlivened his spirits. At her suggestion it was, and under her sustaining encouragement, that he composed the immortal ballad of "John Gilpin," the "Dirge for the Royal George," and his greatest work, "The Task." Love being proscribed by his repeated subjection to insanity, friendship was the resource in which he was thrice fortunate.

Far above all others in the number of his female friends, in importance, must be ranked Mary Unwin, whose name is indissolubly joined with his in the memories of all who are familiar with his plaintive story. Mrs. Unwin, wife of a clergyman, religious after the most scrupulous evangelical type, was first drawn to Cowper by a sectarian interest. They were fated to be friends, as by the striking of a die. "That woman," he soon wrote to Lady Hesketh, "is a blessing to me; and I never see her without being the better for her company." This is the secret of the charm of all true friendship—that it soothes the heart, clarifies the mind, heightens the soul. One feels so much the better for it. Almost penniless as he was, a shiftless manager, assailed by terrible depression and even madness, the Unwins took him under their roof, and gave him a home on the most generous terms. From this time until her death, the friendship of Mary was a necessity to Cowper, the greatest support and enjoyment the hapless poet knew, combining with his native humor and gentleness to combat his melancholy malady with frequent and long victories. In his fits of insanity, she watched and waited on him day and night, defying alike personal hardships and the slanderous remarks of the vile. The only drawback on Cowper's indebtedness to Mrs. Unwin was her jealous wish to restrict him to the society of her own sect of religionists, that harrowing type of piety represented by John Newton. Otherwise, he might have enjoyed much more frequent and prolonged periods of what he cheerily characterized as "absences of Mr. Blue-devil." Lady Hesketh said of her, "She seems in truth to have no will left on earth but for his good. How she has supported the constant attendance she has gone through with the last thirteen years is to me, I confess, wonderful." Cowper himself said, "It is to her, under Providence, I owe it that I am alive at all." With a devotion in which self appeared to be lost, "there she sat, on the hardest and smallest chair, leaving the best to him, knitting, with the finest possible needles, stockings of the nicest texture. He wore no others than of her knitting." After nearly a generation of her fond and sedulous ministering, repeatedly stricken with paralysis, her mind decayed, mute, almost blind, as she sat by his side, a pathetic memento of what she had been, Cowper composed for her that unsurpassed tribute, his exquisite and imperishable lines, "To Mary":

The twentieth year has well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast:
Ah! would that this might be our last,
My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow:
I see thee daily weaker grow;
'Tis my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!

Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust, disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!

Thy indistinct expressions seem
Like language uttered in a dream;
Yet me they charm, whate'er the theme,
My Mary!

Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
Are still more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of orient light,
My Mary!

Partakers of my sad decline,
Thy hands their little force resign;
Yet, gently prest, press gently mine,
My Mary!

Yet ah! by constant heed, I know
How oft the sadness that I show
Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe,
My Mary!

And should my future lot be cast
With much resemblance of the past,
Thy worn-out heart will break at last,
My Mary!

Lady Hesketh, ever a true angel, came and dwelt with the afflicted pair. And when Cowper, after four wretched years of separation, plunged, as he expressed it, in deeps unvisited by any human soul save his, followed his faithful sister-spirit to a better world, Lady Hesketh, that model of a third friend, built, in St. Edmund's Chapel, where he was buried, a monument displaying two tablets, both bearing poetical inscriptions; one dedicated to William Cowper, the other to Mary Unwin. The friendship of Garrick and Mrs. Clive is memorable for its sprightliness, sincerity, unbroken harmony-saving a few momentary quarrels for relish—long duration, and the large measure of happiness it yielded. Their correspondence is very entertaining, and reflects honor on them both. Their talents and virtues contributed in a high degree to adorn and elevate the profession to which they belonged. It is an interesting fact, equally creditable to all the parties, that "Pivy," as they affectionately called Kittie Clive, was as dear to the excellent Mrs. Garrick as to her brilliant husband. The friendship of David Garrick was also one of the most delightful features in the life of the admirable Hannah More. A letter written by Hannah on seeing him play Lear, greatly pleased him, and led to their acquaintance. Acquaintance soon ripened into a warm esteem, and produced a friendship of the most cordial—and intimate character, which lasted until death. He declared that the nine muses had taken up their residence in her mind; and both in his conversation and his letters he constantly called her "Nine." One day when she and Johnson, and a few others, were at table with the Garricks, David read to the company her Sir Eldred, with such inimitable feeling that the happy authoress burst into tears. Friendship filled a large space in the life of Hannah More, administering incalculable strength in her labors, joy in her successes, comfort in her afflictions. It has left its memorials in the records of a host of visits, gifts, letters, poems, dedications. Her correspondence with Sir William Pepys shows what an invaluable resource a wise, pure, comprehensive friendship is in the life of a thoughtful woman. Bishop Porteus bequeathed her a legacy of a hundred pounds. She consecrated an urn to him near her house with an inscription in memory of his long and faithful friendship. Mr. Turner, of Belmont, to whom she was for six years betrothed, but broke off the engagement after he had three times postponed the appointed wedding-day, always retained the highest esteem for her, and left her a thousand pounds at his death. She also maintained a most friendly relation, as long as his increasing habit of intemperance allowed it, with her early tutor, Langhorne, the translator of Plutarch. On occasion of an anticipated visit from her, Langhorne wrote a very pretty poem, beginning,

Blow, blow, my sweetest rose!
For Hannah More will soon be here;
And all that crowns the ripening year
Should triumph where she goes.

Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott were deeply attached friends. United by a generous admiration for genius, by esteem for exalted worth and by community of tastes, they were drawn still more closely together by many mutual kindnesses, visits, and frequent correspondence. A copy of Scott's "Marmion," fresh from the press, was placed in Joanna's hands. She cut the leaves and began to read it aloud to a small circle of friends, when she suddenly came upon the following magnificent and electrifying tribute to herself: