Still less does Friendship confer any privilege to make ourselves disagreeable. Some people never seem to appreciate their friends till they have lost them. Anaxagoras described the Mausoleum as the ghost of wealth turned into stone.
"But he who has once stood beside the grave to look back on the companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent then are the wild love and the keen sorrow, to give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust." [1]
Death, indeed, cannot sever friendship. "Friends," says Cicero, "though absent, are still present; though in poverty they are rich; though weak, yet in the enjoyment of health; and, what is still more difficult to assert, though dead they are alive." This seems a paradox, yet it there not much truth in his explanation? "To me, indeed, Scipio still lives, and will always live; for I love the virtue of that man, and that worth is not yet extinguished…. Assuredly of all things that either fortune or time has bestowed on me, I have none which I can compare with the friendship of Scipio."
If, then, we choose our friends for what they are, not for what they have, and if we deserve so great a blessing, then they will be always with us, preserved in absence, and even after death, in the "amber of memory."
[1] Ruskin.
CHAPTER VI.
THE VALUE OF TIME.
Each day is a little life.
All other good gifts depend on time for their value. What are friends, books, or health, the interest of travel or the delights of home, if we have not time for their enjoyment? Time is often said to be money, but it is more-it is life; and yet many who would cling desperately to life, think nothing of wasting time.
Ask of the wise, says Schiller in Lord Sherbrooke's translation,