I
Persons
It was a charming fancy of the Pythagoreans to exchange names when they met that so they might partake of the virtues each admired in the other. And knowing the power of names they used only such as were musical and pleasing. The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,—by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,—becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. What aspirations it awakens! what prospects! To what advantages, adventures, sacrifices, successes, does it not lead its votaries! What if these early unions are sometimes less tempered with discretion than those formed later, if they maintain their freshness and open out sure prospects of an endless future? He surely has no future who is without friends to share it with him, and is wasting an existence meant to give him that assurance. With this sentiment there comes every felicity into the breasts of those who partake of it. How large the dividend of delight! how diffusive! We are the richer for every outlay. We dip our pitchers in these fountains to come away overspilling with satisfaction. And had we a thousand friends, every spring within us would gush forth at the touch of these wands of tenderness, and the days pass as uncounted moments in their company.
“O friend, the bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the millround of our fate
A sunpath in thy worth:
Me, too, thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life,
Are through thy friendship fair.”
How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget.
Spectral and cold, indeed, were life surveyed from the senses alone, not from the soul, wanting the enthusiasm that persons inspire, the faith which exalts us above ourselves, giving us friends to love, and a God to adore. We enter heaven through the gates of friendship. ’Tis by some supreme fellowship that we complete ourselves, and are united to our kind.
I esteem friendship the fairest as the eldest of religious faiths, being the worship of the unseen through the seen, and excusing many superstitions coloring the need of a personal object of worship. The love and service rendered to persons symbolizes love and service due the Supreme Person; and he must be pronounced deficient in piety who fails of winning the noblest of victories,—a friend. A need of the heart, the best of our life is embosomed in others, much of it taken upon trust in some one or more whom we call by tender names, and whose words accost us with persuasions irresistible. How affectionately one name is pronounced throughout a revering Christendom, because it symbolizes man’s friend,—that fairest word in the human vocabulary.
“Fair flowery name, in none like thee
And thy nectareal fragrancy,
Hourly there meets
A universal synod of all sweets,
By whom it is defined thus:
That no perfume
May yet presume
To pass for odoriferous,
But such alone whose sacred pedigree
Can prove itself some kin, sweet name, to thee.”
We crave objects abreast and above us. And are bereft of ourselves without such. Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs. The passionless laws that sway our unseen Personality are not made lovely to us till thus clothed in human attributes and brought near to our hearts, person embracing person. Not some It in our friends, but the sentiment that transfigures the It into Him, into Her,—this alone makes them ours personally and beloved. Theists in our faith, we pay our vows to the Friend in our friend, thus becoming personally One with the Three, and alone no longer.
Nor elsewise man shall fellow meet,
In public place, in converse sweet,
In holy aisles, at market gate,
In learning’s halls, or courts of state,
Nor persons properly shall find,
Save in the commonwealth of Mind;
Fair forms herein their souls intrude,
Peopling what else were solitude.
Persons are love’s world. Our Paradise is too fair to be planted out of our breasts. We chase the fleeing beauty all our lives long;
“Nor is there near so brisk a fire
In fruition, as desire;
The niggard sense, too poor for bliss,
Pays us but dully with what is.”
On, onwards, ever onwards are we led. Our Edens abreast of us journeying with ever-opening prospects in the distance.
the chase.
O’er earth and seas,
In sunshine, shade,
Blest Beauty crossed,
Nor stopt nor stayed,
Nor temples took,
Nor idols hewed,
Apart she dwelt
In solitude.
In solitude, Heart said:
“Where find the maid?
My bride’s a fugitive,
From sight doth live,
And hearts are hunters of the game,
Pursuers of the same
Through every passing form,
The Beauty that all eyes do seek,
All eyes do but deform;
The love our faithless lips would speak
Dies on the listless air,
Nature befriends us not,
Nor hearthside doth prepare
In all her ample plot;
Life’s but illusion,
Cunning confusion;
Flings shadows pale about our path,
She shadow is, and nothing hath;
Eyes are divorced from seeing,
Hearts cloven clean from being;
My bride I cannot find,
My love I cannot bind;
The thousand fair ones of our sphere,
Fond, false ones all, nor mine, nor dear;
The Paradise
I would surprise,
From all my following flies,
And I’m a thousand infidelities;
There’s none for me
In all I see;
Surely the Fair One bides not here,
Where dwells she, where, in any sphere?”
“In any sphere?”
Love whispered: “Where, where, if not here?
Here in thy breast the maiden find,
Ideas sole imparadise the mind;
Here heart’s hymeneals begin,
Here’s ours and only ours housed here within:
Through parting gates of human kind
Enter thou blest the Unseen Mind.”