w is gracefully and
effectively maintained in an article entitled "De l'Amitie," in the
fifteenth volume of "Harper's Magazine." Such special pleadings,
however, will have slight weight with a sincere inquirer after the
truth.

The most important principle for the guidance of such an inquirer is
this: Friendship can be carried, without adulteration or peril, to a
degree proportioned to the nobleness and consecration of the parties.
It is shocking for those drawn together by a common pursuit of
pleasures, to judge, by the standard applicable to themselves, those
attracted towards each other by a common service of authorities. As a
general rule, sensuality is in inverse ratio to intellectuality, but
sensibility in direct ratio.

Accordingly, there is a select class of men and women, of the
loftiest genius and character, the native haunt of whose souls is in
the purest regions of nature and experience, who are made for
friendship; and who, destitute of this, are deprived of their truest
and fullest happiness. The movement of imagination which beauty
starts in them keeps to the chariot-paths of celestial ideas, and is
never switched into the burning tracks of sense. Friendship then
reigns in sovereign distinction from love, sometimes by an
unfittedness for the latter, sometimes by the interposition of moral
principles and sentiments which lift their insulating behests as an
impenetrable wall between the different regions.

One of the most striking of the testimonies borne to the value of the
friendship of a woman is that of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton:

"It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuit or avocation,
to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a
subtile delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgment, which
ire rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be
really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character,
honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing; for
a woman Triend always desires to be proud of you. At the same time,
her constitutional timidity makes her more cautious than your male
friend. She, therefore, seldom counsels you to do an imprudent thing.
By friendships I mean pure friendships, those in which there s no
admixture of the passion of love, except in the married state. A
man's best female friend is a wife of good sense and good heart, whom
he loves, and who loves him. If he have that, he need not seek
else