flagrant than with such writers, usually the very ones
the reader most clings to, who put off, as it seems, until directing
the envelope, the question of whom they are writing to.

Yet the annoyance they give one is almost compensated when, once in a
blue moon, in such a superscription-less epistle, one lights upon a
sentence very exclusively directed to one's self; when suddenly out of
the vague _tenebrae_ of such a letter, there comes, retreating as
suddenly, a glance, a grasp, a clasp. It seems quite probable that young
Endymion, in his noted love passages with the moon, may have had
occasionally supreme felicity of this kind, in a relation otherwise of
painfully impersonal and public nature; when, to wit, the goddess, after
shining night after night over the seas and plains and hills,
occasionally shot from behind a cloud one little gleam, one arrow of
light, straight on to Latmos.

But, alack! as Miss Howe wrote to the immortal Clarissa, my paper is at
an end, my crowquill worn to the stump. So I can only add as postscript
to such of my dear friends as write the letters which my soul abhors,
that I hope, beg, entreat they will at least write them to me often.

NEW FRIENDS AND OLD

There is not unfrequently a spice of humiliation hidden in the rich
cordial pleasure of a new friendship, and I think Emerson knew it.
Without beating about the bush as he does, one might explain it,
methinks, not merely as a vague sense of disloyalty towards the other
friendships which are not new; but also as a shrewd suspicion (though we
hide it from ourselves) that this one also will have to grow old in its
turn. And we have not yet found out how to treat any of our possessions,
including our own selves, in such a way that they shall, if anything,
improve. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on
account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it
less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the
full use and full pleasure of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old
one. Those ghastly paper toilettes of the ladies in "Looking Backward"
are emblematic of our modes of proceeding. We are for ever dressing and
undressing our souls, if not our bodies, in rags made out of rags.

Heaven forbid that I should ever blaspheme new friendships! They are
among the most necessary as well as the most delightful things we get a
chance of. They do not merely exhilarate, but actuall