, no strength of character is developed.
Such people are superficial and unreal. They ask everything and have
nothing to give. The stream is so large and constant that there is
nothing left in the reservoir. Friendship must rest on solid
foundations of independence and mutual respect. With great clearness and
force Emerson proclaims this law in his Essay on Friendship: "We must be
our own before we can be another's. Let me be alone to the end of the
world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look,
his real sympathy. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only
joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate where
I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to
find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend
than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to
do without it. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let
it be an alliance of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld,
mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity, which,
beneath these disparities, unites them."

THE PENALTY.

+If we refuse to go in company there is nothing left for us but to
trudge along the dreary way alone.+--If we will not bear one another's
burdens, we must bear our own when they are heaviest in our unaided
strength; and fall beneath their weight. Here as everywhere penalty is
simply the inevitable consequence of conduct. The loveless heart is
doomed to drag out its term of years in the cheerless isolation of a
life from which the light of love has been withdrawn.

CHAPTER XVIII.

The Family.

Thus far we have considered our fellow-men as units, with whom it is our
privilege and duty to come into external relations. These external
relations after all do not reach the deepest center of our lives. They
indeed bind man to man in bonds of helpfulness and service. But the two
who are thus united remain two separate selves after all. Even
friendship leaves unsatisfied yearnings, undeveloped possibilities in
human hearts. However subtle and tender the bond may be, it remains to
the last physical rather than chemical; mechanical rather than vital;
the outward attachment of mutually exclusive wholes, rather than the
inner blending of complemental elements which lose their separate
selfhood in the unity of a new and higher life. The beginning of this
true spiritual life, in which the i