through story after story of our vanity
and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin
to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our
own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others, and
still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in
with the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf
the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that
at the last, when such a pin falls out--when there vanishes in the least
breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for
our supply--when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the
faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with
those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to
memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace
of our life.

III

One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us
labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most
serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint
thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great
gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student
gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw
him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies; we
loved his notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than
when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked
among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds
of a most influential life.

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back,
I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow
of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding,
urbanity, and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our
friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent, and inhumane;
and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry demolish honest sentiment. I
can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit
streets, "La ci darem la mano" on his lips, a noble figure of a youth,
but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere
on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony, and
his self-respect miserably went down.

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately as