If any members of your family have the love of books, aid them in satisfying it. Such are the salt of the earth. They are the blazed trees in the dark forests of the present generations, to mark out that course which shall, in future ages, be the highway of the whole world.
The friend thou hast, and his adoption tried,
Grapple him to thy soul with hooks of steel.—Shakspeare.
I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd,
"How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude!"
But grant me still a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper "Solitude is sweet!"—Cowper.
hatever the number of a man's friends" says Lord Lytton, "there are times in his life when he has one too few." "Life," says Sydney Smith, "is to be fortified by many friendships." Says Bishop Hare: "Friendship is love without its flowers or veil." "A faithful friend is the true image of the Deity," said Napoleon, who never believed he had a true friend not a born fool. "A friend loveth at all times," says the Bible. Says Herr Gotthold: "with a clear sky, a bright sun, and a gentle breeze, you will have friends in plenty, but let fortune frown and the firmament be overcast, and then your friends will prove
LIKE THE STRINGS OF THE LUTE,
of which you will tighten ten before you find one that will bear the stretch and keep the pitch." "What an argument in favor of social connections," says Lord Greville, "is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasures we have more." Horace Walpole has given clear expression to one of the chief pleasures of friendship:
"OLD FRIENDS