descend to meet.  All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.  What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!  After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought.  Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.

9.  I ought to be equal to every relation.  It makes no difference how many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal.  If I have shrunk unequal from one contest instantly, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly.  I should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum.

    “The valiant warrior[295] famoused for fight,
       After a hundred victories, once foiled,
     Is from the book of honor razed quite,
       And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”

10.  Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked.  Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening.  It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it.  Respect the naturlangsamkeit[296] which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows.  The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness.  Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.  Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.

11.  The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.

12.  I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage.  When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.  For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves?  Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny.  In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men.  But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell.  Happy is the house that shelters a friend!  It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him