m, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more
of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their
immediate need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
association-not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love
only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make
each other happy-by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear
about them-down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces
in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex
makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of
life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received,
when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our
mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a brother
to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed
and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such
friendship is not even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a
woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness
and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the
same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it
would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were,
a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that
he had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong
and positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part
coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain
to himself and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small
lives under foot.

*****

I could have thought he had been eaves-dropping at the doors of my
heart, so entire was the coincidence between his writing and my thought.

*****

A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even
as they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them,
will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.

*****

The morning drum-call on my eager ear
Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew
Lies yet undried along my field of noon.
But now I pause at whiles in what I do,
And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear
(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.

*****

The ground of all youth's suffering, solitu