us with a sigh dust
is committed to dust.

"What passions our friendships were!" said Thackeray to FitzGerald,
speaking of University days. There is a shadow of melancholy in the
saying, because it implies that for Thackeray at all events that kind
of glow had faded out of life. Perhaps--who knows?--he had accustomed
himself, with those luminous, observant, humorous eyes, to look too deep
into the heart of man, to study too closely and too laughingly the seamy
side, the strange contrast between man's hopes and his performances, his
dreams and his deeds. Ought one to be ashamed if that kind of generous
enthusiasm, that intensity of admiration, that vividness of sympathy die
out of one's heart? Is it possible to keep alive the warmth, the colour
of youth, suffusing all the objects near it with a lively and rosy glow?
Some few people seem to find it possible, and can add to it a kind of
rich tolerance, a lavish affectionateness, which pierces even deeper,
and sees even more clearly, than the old partial idealisation. Such a
large-hearted affection is found as a rule most often in people
whose lives have brought them into intimate connection with their
fellow-creatures--in priests, doctors, teachers, who see others not
in their guarded and superficial moments, but in hours of sharp and
poignant emotion. In many cases the bounds of sympathy narrow themselves
into the family and the home--because there only are men brought into an
intimate connection with human emotion; because to many people, and to
the Anglo-Saxon race in particular, emotional situations are a strain,
and only professional duty, which is a strongly rooted instinct in
the Anglo-Saxon temperament, keeps the emotional muscles agile and
responsive.

Another thing which tends to extinguish friendships is that many of the
people who desire to form them, and who do form them, wish to have
the pleasures of friendship without the responsibilities. In the
self-abandonment of friendship we become aware of qualities and strains
in the friend which we do not wholly like. One of the most difficult
things to tolerate in a friend are faults which are similar without
being quite the same. A common quality, for instance, in the Anglo-Saxon
race, is a touch of vulgarity, which is indeed the quality that makes
them practically successful. A great many Anglo-Saxon people have a
certain snobbishness, to give it a hard name; it is probably the poison
of the feudal system lurkin