But after all, the very best thing in good talk, and the thing that helps it most, is FRIENDSHIP. How it dissolves the barriers that divide us, and loosens all constraint, and diffuses itself like some fine old cordial through all the veins of life—this feeling that we understand and trust each other, and wish each other heartily well! Everything into which it really comes is good. It transforms letter-writing from a task into a pleasure. It makes music a thousand times more sweet. The people who play and sing not at us, but TO us,—how delightful it is to listen to them! Yes, there is a talkability that can express itself even without words. There is an exchange of thought and feeling which is happy alike in speech and in silence. It is quietness pervaded with friendship.
Having come thus far in the exposition of Montaigne, I shall conclude with an opinion of my own, even though I cannot quote a sentence of his to back it.
The one person of all the world in whom talkability is most desirable, and talkativeness least endurable, is a wife.
A WILD STRAWBERRY
"Such is the story of the Boblink; once spiritual, musical,
admired, the joy of the meadows, and the favourite bird of
spring; finally a gross little sensualist who expiates his
sensuality in the larder. His story contains a moral, worthy
the attention of all little birds and little boys; warning
them to keep to those refined and intellectual pursuits
which raised him to so high a pitch of popularity during the
early part of his career; but to eschew all tendency to that
gross and dissipated indulgence, which brought this mistaken
little bird to an untimely end."
—WASHINGTON IRVING: Wolfert's Roost.
The Swiftwater brook was laughing softly to itself as it ran through a strip of hemlock forest on the edge of the Woodlings' farm. Among the evergreen branches overhead the gayly-dressed warblers,—little friends of the forest,—were flitting to and fro, lisping their June songs of contented love: milder, slower, lazier notes than those in which they voiced the amourous raptures of May. Prince's Pine and golden loose-strife and pink laurel and blue hare-bells and purple-fringed orchids, and a score of lovely flowers were all abloom. The late spring had hindered some; the sudden heats of early summer had hastened others; and now they seemed to come out all together, as if Nature had suddenly tilted up her cornucopia and poured forth her treasures in spendthrift joy.
I lay on a mossy bank at the foot of a tree, filling my pipe after a frugal lunch, and thinking how hard it would be to find in any quarter of the globe a place more fair and fragrant than this hidden vale among the Alleghany Mountains. The perfume of the flowers of the forest is more sweet and subtle than the heavy scent of tropical blossoms. No lily-field in Bermuda could give a fragrance half so magical as the fairy-like odour of these woodland slopes, soft carpeted with the green of glossy vines above whose tiny leaves, in delicate profusion,
"The slight Linnaea hangs its twin-born heads."
Nor are there any birds in Africa, or among the Indian Isles, more exquisite in colour than these miniature warblers, showing their gold and green, their orange and black, their blue and white, against the dark background of the rhododendron thicket.