ter. And if you are truly in earnest, you need be at
no loss what to say: the words will suggest themselves.

Letters of friendship may be divided into two sorts--real and pretended.
A real letter of friendship commends itself directly to the heart. There
is a warm, genial glow about it, as welcome as the blaze of a hickory or
sea-coal fire to one coming in from the cold, bitter breeze of a
December night. It makes one philanthropic and a believer in human
goodness. What cheer--what ardent cheer is there in a letter
unexpectedly received from an old friend between whom and one's self
roll years of absence, or stretch lands and seas of distance! It is like
a boon from the very heaven of memory. But a pretended letter of
friendship--how easily detected! how transparent its falsity! The
loadstone of love touches it, and finds it mere brass. Its influence is
icy and bleak, like the rays of the moon, from which all the lenses on
earth cannot extract one particle of heat.

And what can be said of love letters--those flowers of feeling, those
redundant roses of recapitulation? There is one strain running through
their first parts, and then--_da capo_. They are the same thing, over
and over and over again, and then--repeat. Yet are they never wearisome
to those who write or to those who acceptably receive. They are like the
interviews of their writers, excessively stupid to everybody else, but
exquisitely charming to themselves; that is, _real_ love letters; not
those absurd things--amusing from their very absurdity--which novelists
palm off upon innocent readers as the correspondence of heroes and
heroines. Verily is there a distinction between letters written by
lovers and love letters. The former may be deeply interesting to
uninterested readers, while the latter are the very quintessence of
egotistical selfishness; for, indeed, lovers may sometimes write about
other matters besides love, as, for example, in the famous epistles of
Abelard and Heloise.

'Heaven first taught letters for some wretch's aid,
Some banish'd lover or some captive maid;
They live, they breathe, they speak what love inspires,
Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires;
The virgin's wish without her fears impart,
Excuse the blush, and pour out all the heart;
Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,
And waft a sigh from Indus to the pole.'

About the other kinds of letters which have been enumerated, we shall
have nothing t