sex and circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.  High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts.  These are new poetry of the first Bard[282]—­poetry without stop—­hymn, ode and epic,[283] poetry still flowing, Apollo[284] and the Muses[285] chanting still.  Will these two separate themselves from me again, or some of them?  I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius[286] of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

6.  I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point.  It is almost dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison,[287] of misused wine” of the affections.  A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep.  I have had such fine fancies lately about two or three persons, as have given me delicious hours, but the joy ends in the day:  it yields no fruit.  Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified.  I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues.  I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden.  We over-estimate the conscience of our friend.  His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less.  Everything that is his,—­his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments,—­fancy enhances.  Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

7.  Yet the systole and diastole[288] of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love.  Friendship, like the immortality[289] of the soul, is too good to be believed.  The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief.  We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterward worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation.  In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself.  In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness.  Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple?[290] Shall I not be as real as the things I see?  If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.  Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension.  The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short.  And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amid these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet.[291] A man who stands united with his thought, conceives magnificently to himself.  He is conscious of a universal success,[292]