hing but smoke;
an obscure and tedious night from the day that I lost him. I have led
a sorrowful and languishing life ever since. I was so accustomed to be
always his second in all places and in all interests, that methinks I
am now no more than half a man, and have but half a being." We would
hardly expect such passion of love and regret from the easy-going,
genial, garrulous essayist.

The joy that comes from a true communion of heart with another is
perhaps one of the purest and greatest in the world, but its function
is not exhausted by merely giving pleasure. Though we may not be
conscious of it, there is a deeper purpose in it, an education in the
highest arts of living. We may be enticed by the pleasure it affords,
but its greatest good is got by the way. Even intellectually it means
the opening of a door into the mystery of life. Only love
_understands_ after all. It gives insight. We cannot truly know
anything without sympathy, without getting out of self and entering
into others. A man cannot be a true naturalist, and observe the ways
of birds and insects accurately, unless he can watch long and lovingly.
We can never know children, unless we love them. Many of the chambers
of the house of life are forever locked to us, until love gives us the
key.

To learn to love all kinds of nobleness gives insight into the true
significance of things, and gives a standard to settle their relative
importance. An uninterested spectator sees nothing; or, what is worse,
sees wrongly. Most of our mean estimates of human nature in modern
literature, and our false realisms in art, and our stupid pessimisms in
philosophy, are due to an unintelligent reading of surface facts. Men
set out to note and collate impressions, and make perhaps a scientific
study of slumdom, without genuine interest in the lives they see, and
therefore without true insight into them. They miss the inwardness,
which love alone can supply. If we look without love we can only see
the outside, the mere form and expression of the subject studied. Only
with tender compassion and loving sympathy can we see the beauty even
in the eye dull with weeping and in the fixed face pale with care. We
will often see noble patience shining through them, and loyalty to
duty, and virtues and graces unsuspected by others.

The divine meaning of a true friendship is that it is often the first
unveiling of the secret of love. It is not an end in itself, bu