How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget.
Spectral and cold, indeed, were life surveyed from the senses alone, not from the soul, wanting the enthusiasm that persons inspire, the faith which exalts us above ourselves, giving us friends to love, and a God to adore. We enter heaven through the gates of friendship. 'Tis by some supreme fellowship that we complete ourselves, and are united to our kind.
I esteem friendship the fairest as the eldest of religious faiths, being the worship of the unseen through the seen, and excusing many superstitions coloring the need of a personal object of worship. The love and service rendered to persons symbolizes love and service due the Supreme Person; and he must be pronounced deficient in piety who fails of winning the noblest of victories,—a friend. A need of the heart, the best of our life is embosomed in others, much of it taken upon trust in some one or more whom we call by tender names, and whose words accost us with persuasions irresistible. How affectionately one name is pronounced throughout a revering Christendom, because it symbolizes man's friend,—that fairest word in the human vocabulary.
"Fair flowery name, in none like thee And thy nectareal fragrancy, Hourly there meets A universal synod of all sweets, By whom it is defined thus: That no perfume May yet presume To pass for odoriferous, But such alone whose sacred pedigree Can prove itself some kin, sweet name, to thee."
We crave objects abreast and above us. And are bereft of ourselves without such. Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs. The passionless laws that sway our unseen Personality are not made lovely to us till thus clothed in human attributes and brought near to our hearts, person embracing person. Not some It in our friends, but the sentiment that transfigures the It into Him, into Her,—this alone makes them ours personally and beloved. Theists in our faith, we pay our vows to the Friend in our friend, thus becoming personally One with the Three, and alone no longer.
Nor elsewise man shall fellow meet, In public place, in converse sweet, In holy aisles, at market gate, In learning's halls, or courts of state, Nor persons properly shall find, Save in the commonwealth of Mind; Fair forms herein their souls intrude, Peopling what else were solitude.
Persons are love's world. Our Paradise is too fair to be planted out of our breasts. We chase the fleeing beauty all our lives long;
"Nor is there near so brisk a fire In fruition, as desire; The niggard sense, too poor for bliss, Pays us but dully with what is."
On, onwards, ever onwards are we led. Our Edens abreast of us journeying with ever-opening prospects in the distance.
the chase.