vanities of subsequent life.  Circumstances and affinities produced those friendships, and circumstances or time dissolved them,—­like the merry meetings of Prince Hal and Falstaff; like the companionship of curious or ennuied travellers on the heights of Righi or in the galleries of Florence.  The cord which binds together the selfish and the worldly in the quest for pleasure, in the search for gain, in the toil for honors, at a bacchanalian feast, in a Presidential canvass, on a journey to Niagara,—­is a rope of sand; a truth which the experienced know, yet which is so bitter to learn.  It is profound philosophy, as well as religious experience, which confirms this solemn truth.  The soul can repose only on the certitudes of heaven; those who are joined together by the gospel feel alike the misery of the fall and the glory of the restoration.  The impressive earnestness which overpowers the mind when eternal and momentous truths are the subjects of discourse binds people together with a force of sympathy which cannot be produced by the sublimity of a mountain or the beauty of a picture.  And this enables them to bear each other’s burdens, and hide each other’s faults, and soothe each other’s resentments; to praise without hypocrisy, rebuke without malice, rejoice without envy, and assist without ostentation.  This divine sympathy alone can break up selfishness, vanity, and pride.  It produces sincerity, truthfulness, disinterestedness,—­without which any friendship will die.  It is not the remembrance of pleasure which keeps alive a friendship, but the perception of virtues.  How can that live which is based on corruption or a falsehood?  Anything sensual in friendship passes away, and leaves a residuum of self-reproach, or undermines esteem.  That which preserves undying beauty and sacred harmony and celestial glory is wholly based on the spiritual in man, on moral excellence, on the joys of an emancipated soul.  It is not easy, in the giddy hours of temptation or folly, to keep this truth in mind, but it can be demonstrated by the experience of every struggling character.  The soul that seeks the infinite and imperishable can be firmly knit only to those who live in the realm of adoration,—­the adoration of beauty, or truth, or love; and unless a man or woman does prefer the infinite to the finite, the permanent to the transient, the true to the false, the incorruptible to the corruptible there is not even the capacity of friendship, unless a low view be taken of it to advance our interests, or enjoy passing pleasures which finally end in bitter disappointments and deep disgusts.