e catch an eye-this is our opportunity in
the ages--and we wag our tail with a poor smile. 'IS THAT ALL?' All?
If you only knew! But how can they know? They do not love us; the more
fools we to squander life on the indifferent. But the morality of the
thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying
to understand others that we can get our own hearts understood; and
in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the most successful
pleader.

*****

There is no friendship so noble, but it is the product of the time; and
a world of little finical observances, and little frail proprieties and
fashions of the hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect,
the union of spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such
interference. The trick of the country and the age steps in even between
the mother and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly
fingers, and says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall
be a matter of confidence between them, and this other thing shall not.

*****

There is not anything more bitter than to lose a fancied friend.

*****

The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his
wife and friends; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in
his life may yet be himself one lie-heart and face, from top to bottom.
This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice versa,
veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and
your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion--that is the truth which
makes love possible and mankind happy.

*****

But surely it is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give
than to receive, to serve than to use our companions; and, above all,
where there is no question of service upon either side, that it is good
to enjoy their company like a natural man.

*****

A man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one
so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his
happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few
light words, a piece of stamped paper, or a woman's bright eyes--he may
be left in a month destitute of all.

*****

In these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times disappointed in our
beggarly selves for once that we are disappointed in our friend; that it
is we who seem most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us;
and that it is by our friend's conduct t