But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is
proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set down
to the individual as disadvantages. We sink as easily as we rise,
through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their
sympathies, their native aims being high enough, but their relation
all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to
live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their
demerits,--by their love of gossip, or sheer tolerance and animal
good-nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.

The remedy is, to reinforce each of these moods from the
other. Conversation will not corrupt us, if we come to the assembly in
our own garb and speech, and with the energy of health to select what
is ours and reject what is not. Society we must have; but let it be
society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish. Is it
society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my
nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists
by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and
a rapid self-distribution takes place into sets and pairs. The best
are accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say, they
separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love
or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference
with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All
conversation is a magnetic experiment. I know that my friend can talk
eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have
seen him in different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put
Stubbs and Byron, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make
them all wretched. 'Tis an extempore Sing-Sing built in a
parlor. Leave them to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry
as sparrows.

A higher civility will reestablish in our customs a certain reverence
which we have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break
through all fences, and make themselves at home in every house? I find
out in an instant if my companion does not want me, and ropes cannot
hold me when my welcome is gone. One would think that the affinities
would pronounce themselves with a surer reciprocity.

Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme
antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with