A Friend Is One Who Incessantly Pays
Us The Compliment Of Expecting From Us All The Virtues, And Who
Can Appreciate Them In Us.
It takes two to speak the truth, - one
to speak, and another to hear.
How can one treat with
magnanimity mere wood and stone? If we dealt only with the false
and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth. Only
lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth, while traders
prize a cheap honesty, and neighbors and acquaintance a cheap
civility. In our daily intercourse with men, our nobler
faculties are dormant and suffered to rust. None will pay us the
compliment to expect nobleness from us. Though we have gold to
give, they demand only copper. We ask our neighbor to suffer
himself to be dealt with truly, sincerely, nobly; but he answers
no by his deafness. He does not even hear this prayer. He says
practically, I will be content if you treat me as "no better than
I should be," as deceitful, mean, dishonest, and selfish. For
the most part, we are contented so to deal and to be dealt with,
and we do not think that for the mass of men there is any truer
and nobler relation possible. A man may have _good_ neighbors,
so called, and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents,
brothers, sisters, children, who meet himself and one another on
this ground only. The State does not demand justice of its
members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least
degree of it, hardly more than rogues practise; and so do the
neighborhood and the family. What is commonly called Friendship
even is only a little more honor among rogues.
But sometimes we are said to _love_ another, that is, to stand in
a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive
the best from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth, there is
love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one
another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our
ideal. There are passages of affection in our intercourse with
mortal men and women, such as no prophecy had taught us to
expect, which transcend our earthly life, and anticipate Heaven
for us. What is this Love that may come right into the middle of
a prosaic Goffstown day, equal to any of the gods? that discovers
a new world, fair and fresh and eternal, occupying the place of
the old one, when to the common eye a dust has settled on the
universe? which world cannot else be reached, and does not exist.
What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to
be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful
that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare, indeed, but,
like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and
modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the
stucco which overlies the heart.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 150 of 221
Words from 78633 to 79135
of 116321
