Affinity of friends
and confidants merely. ‘Know that the contrariety of foe and Friend proceeds from God.’ Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail. Even speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it; but it follows after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves till long after the graft has taken. It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act. We are all Mussulmen and fatalists in this respect.
Impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do something kind whenever they meet; they must never be cold. But they who are Friends do not know what they think they must, but what they must. Even their
A sublime phenomenon
Friendship is to some extent but a sublime phenomenon to them.
The true and not despairing Friend will address his Friend in some such terms as these:—
‘I never asked thy leave to let me love thee—I have a right. I love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which I have found. Oh, how I think of you! You are purely good—you are infinitely good. I can trust you for ever. I did not think that humanity was so rich. Give me an opportunity to live.’
‘You are the fact in a fiction—you are the truth more strange and admirable than fiction. Consent only to be what you are. I alone will never stand in your way.’
The fact in a fiction