what content I can find in conversing with each, if
there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one
contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I
should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum:--

"The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a
tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature
ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the
best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the
naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works
in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good
spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love,
which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth
of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the
austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in
the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of
his foundations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for
the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that
select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even
leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this
purer, and nothing is so much divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage.
When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the
solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what
do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward
the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly
stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and
peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul is the nut
itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell.
Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like
a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he
know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He who offers
himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the
great games where the first-born of the