“It surprises me, I confess, that the feeling, judgment, and sagacity, which sufficed to produce the work that I have been commending, should have suffered the golden opinions of me, which you entertained, to be filched and adulterated by mere traducers, whose reports the hearer’s own experience could have almost refuted, and whose testimony was so obviously liable to be warped by prejudice.

“We live in a strange world.  Before my feelings and dispositions had changed from wavering and transient to permanent and fixed,—­before the desultory ramblings, which almost became our age, had terminated in a path, and that, I trust, a right and honorable one, and from which, with moderate allowance for human inferiority, I have not deviated since,—­before my principles had attained their vigor, and generated those correct habits which it was their province to produce,—­in short, while, like most young men, I might be said to have as yet ‘no character at all,’ I obtained your friendship.  How I lost it, I have already told you.  When, remains to tell you.  I lost it when any fruits which my youth may have promised had appeared; lost it all at once, under circumstances scarcely more annoying to my feelings than revolting to my sense of what was right and just.

“I am not seeking to penetrate what is to me, indeed, no secret; neither do I form the unavailing wish that our expired intercourse should revive.  C’en est fait.  A knot which has been loosened or untied may be formed again, but this knot has been cut.  Accordingly, I neither address you by your name nor subscribe my own.  My hand-writing, though not disguised, is, like yourself, much changed; and, though this were not the case, you could not, after the lapse of so much time, have recognized it.

“My regard you continue to possess, though I am not certain of your title to retain it.  But you have, by means of your estrangement, sustained a loss.  In ceasing to entertain a feeling of esteem and cordiality toward me, you have lost that which is a source of soothing gratification to the mind in which it is cherished, and which, I flatter myself, I as well deserved to have retained with regard to me as any other of your early friends, be that other who he may.  Again:  though you have not lost a friend, (for my sentiments toward you continue friendly,) you have elected to lose the usual and not unpalatable fruits of friendship in my case:  and this at a time of life (for we are much of the same age) when old friends can the less be spared, because new friendships are rarely formed.

“When our earliest meetings and the commencements of a bygone friendship are called up before me by the letter which, I scarcely know why, I am writing, I feel myself softened as well as depressed by the recollection; and, as I write farewell, it gives me pain to think that I might add to it the words—­probably forever.