material
and temporal, which, at best, are the merest transient convenience,
there will be hesitation and pain. And this hesitation arises, too, from
the most beautiful and delicately exquisite qualities, but it produces
the pain that is

"----the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute."

There is in life a proportion of pain and jarring that is inevitable,
probably, to the imperfect conditions with which the experience on earth
is temporarily invested; and because of this, all the range of
friendship should be held apart as divine, and any interchange of
material gifts should not receive this undue emphasis, but be regarded
as the mere incidental trifle of momentary convenience, while all the
regard and devotion that may lie behind should give its mutual joy as
free and as pure as the fragrance of a rose. Of all that a friend may be
Emerson so truly says:--

"I fancied he was fled,--
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again.
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form."

That alone is what all the loves and friendships of life are for,--that
through their ministry life may take on nobler form.

"I fancied he was fled."

But a friendship that is true cannot flee; it is, by its very quality
and nature, abiding. It may be silent forever; it may be invisible,
inaudible, immaterial, impersonal; but once forged it is of the heavenly
life, the heavenly language, and the Word of the Lord abideth forever!

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Love and Good Will.]

The stress and storm of life, however, fade away very largely before the
power of simple love and good will, which is the key to all situations
and the solution of all problems. "How shall I seem to love my people?"
asked a French king of his confessor. "My son, you _must_ love them,"
was the reply. When there is genuineness one does not need to engage in
the elaborate and arduous labor of counterfeiting qualities and
manufacturing appearances, and it is really easier--to say nothing of
its being a somewhat more dignified process--to _be_ what one wishes the
world to regard him, than it is to endeavor to merely produce the effect
of it.

Doctor Holmes had a bit of counsel for those who were out at sea,--that
they should