the influences which banish envy and mistrust,—­then there is a precious life in it which survives all change.  In the atmosphere of admiration, respect, and sympathy suspicion dies, and base desires pass away for lack of their accustomed nourishment; we see defects through the glass of our own charity, with eyes of love and pity, while all that is beautiful is rendered radiant; a halo surrounds the mortal form, like the glory which mediaeval artists aspired to paint in the faces of Madonnas; and adoration succeeds to sympathy, since the excellences we admire are akin to the perfections we adore.  “The occult elements” and “latent affinities,” of which material pursuits never take cognizance, are “influences as potent in adding a charm to labor or repose as dew or air, in the natural world, in giving a tint to flowers or sap to vegetation.”

In that charmed circle, in which it would be difficult to say whether Jerome or Paula presided, the aesthetic mission of woman was seen fully,—­perhaps for the first time,—­which is never recognized when love of admiration, or intellectual hardihood, or frivolous employments, or usurped prerogatives blunt original sensibilities and sap the elements of inward life.  Sentiment proved its superiority over all the claims of intellect,—­as when Flora Macdonald effected the escape of Charles Stuart after the fatal battle of Culloden, or when Mary poured the spikenard on Jesus’ head, and wiped his feet with the hairs of her head.  The glory of the mind yielded to the superior radiance of an admiring soul, and equals stood out in each other’s eyes as gifted superiors whom it was no sin to venerate.  Radiant in the innocence of conscious virtue, capable of appreciating any flights of genius, holding their riches of no account except to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, these friends lived only to repair the evils which unbridled sin inflicted on mankind,—­glorious examples of the support which our frail nature needs, the sun and joy of social life, perpetual benedictions, the sweet rest of a harassed soul.

Strange it is that such a friendship was found in the most corrupt, conventional, luxurious city of the empire.  It is not in cities that friendships are supposed to thrive.  People in great towns are too preoccupied, too busy, too distracted to shine in those amenities which require peace and rest and leisure.  Bacon quotes the Latin adage, Magna civitas, magna solitudo.  It is in cities where real solitude dwells, since friends are scattered, “and crowds are not company, and faces are only as a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”