e, they betray
themselves in unjustified likes and dislikes felt for casual persons and
things, in the _je ne sais quoi_ that makes instinctive sympathy. Voice,
manner, aspect, hints of congenial tastes and judgments, a jest in the
right key, a gesture marking the right aversions, all these trifles
leave behind a pervasive impression. We reject a vision we find
indigestible and without congruity to our inner dream; we accept and
incorporate another into our private pantheon, where it becomes a
legitimate figure, however dumb and subsidiary it may remain.

In a refined nature these sensuous premonitions of sympathy are seldom
misleading. Liking cannot, of course, grow into friendship over night as
it might into love; the pleasing impression, even if retained, will lie
perfectly passive and harmless in the mind, until new and different
impressions follow to deepen the interest at first evoked and to remove
its centre of gravity altogether from the senses. In love, if the field
is clear, a single glimpse may, like Tristan's potion, produce a violent
and irresistible passion; but in friendship the result remains more
proportionate to the incidental causes, discrimination is preserved,
jealousy and exclusiveness are avoided. That vigilant, besetting,
insatiable affection, so full of doubts and torments, with which the
lover follows his object, is out of place here; for the friend has no
property in his friend's body or leisure or residual ties; he accepts
what is offered and what is acceptable, and the rest he leaves in peace.
He is distinctly not his brother's keeper, for the society of friends is
free.

[Sidenote: The refracting human medium for ideas.]

Friendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking or
comradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moral
appreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and to
produce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting,
friendship does not arise. Recognition given to a man's talent or virtue
is not properly friendship. Friends must desire to live as much as
possible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures.
Good-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give
spiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be
indifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them,
and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human
medium through which it be