LASTING FRIENDSHIPS.
The man who ill-naturedly said that the church would not hold his acquaintance, but the pulpit would contain his friends, cannot be congratulated upon the disproportion.
“Who is your friend?” is an every-day question, probably never better answered than in the following forcible and eloquent rebuke by a modern writer:
Concerning the man you call your friend, tell me, will he weep with you in the hour of distress? Will he faithfully reprove to your face, for actions which others are ridiculing or censuring behind your back? Will he dare to stand forth in your defence, when detraction is secretly aiming its deadly weapons at your reputation? Will he acknowledge you with the same cordiality, and behave to you with the same friendly attention, in the company of your superiors in rank and fortune, as when the claims of pride or vanity do not interfere with those of friendship? If misfortune and losses should oblige you to retire into a walk of life in which you cannot appear with the same distinction, or entertain your friends with the same liberality as formerly, will he still think himself happy in your society, and, instead of withdrawing himself from an unprofitable connexion, take pleasure in professing himself your friend, and cheerfully assist you to support the burden of your afflictions? When sickness shall call you to retire from the gay and busy scenes of the world, will he follow you into your gloomy retreat, listen with attention to your “tale of symptoms,” and minister the balm of consolation to your fainting spirits? And lastly, when death shall burst asunder every earthly tie, will he shed a tear upon your grave, and lodge the dear remembrance of your mutual friendship in his heart, as a treasure never to be resigned? The man who will not do all this may be your companion,—your flatterer,—but, depend upon it, he is not your friend.
Southey has left this charming picture of Friendship which ceases but with existence:
It may safely be affirmed that generous minds, when they have once known each other, never can be alienated as long as both retain the characteristics which brought them into union. No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other’s worth. There are even some broken attachments in friendship, as well as in love, which nothing can destroy, and it sometimes happens that we are not conscious of their strength till after the disruption. There are a few persons known to me in years long past, but with whom I lived in no particular intimacy then, and have held no correspondence since, whom I could not now meet without an emotion of pleasure deep enough to partake of pain, and who, I doubt not, entertain for me feelings of the same kind and degree—whose eyes sparkle when they hear, and glisten sometimes when they speak of me, and who think of me, as I do of them, with an affection that increases as we advance in years. This is because our moral and intellectual sympathies have strengthened, and because, though far asunder, we know that we are travelling the same road towards our resting-place in heaven. “There is such a pleasure as this,” says Cowper, “which would want explanation to some folks, being perhaps a mystery to those whose hearts are a mere muscle, and serve only for the purpose of an even circulation.”[[119]]
And Professor Wilson has written these words of sweet consolation for the loss of friends:
Friends are lost to us by removal—for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten. But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may have read together, “when life itself was new,” and poetry overflowed the whole world; or a lock of her hair in whose eyes we first knew the meaning of the word “depth.” And if death hath stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity, and removed the distance away into that bourne from which no traveller returns—the absence and the distance of her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore—what heart may abide the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a blessing and a farewell!
It rarely happens that broken friendships can be repaired or renewed. Mrs. Richard Trench, in her Journal, relates this remarkable instance of a failure:
At last, after an interval of twenty-four years, which succeeded a tolerably intimate acquaintance of seven weeks, I saw Count Münster of Hanover again. We met like two ghosts that ought to have been laid long since. I witnessed the whole process of the difficulty of persuading him that I was I; and I thought him as much changed in his degree as he could have found me. When we conversed, all the persons we referred to were dead and gone; and our interview added another link in my mind to the chain of proofs that, after a very, very long interval, neither friends nor acquaintance ought to meet in this world. He was kindly anxious to renew our acquaintance, and visited me next day; but still it seemed as if seeing me had renewed some painful associations.
[119]. The Doctor.