a single day.  Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law!  He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian,[297] to the great games, where the first-born of the world are the competitors.  He proposes himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these.  The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the hap in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles.  There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named.  One is Truth.  A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.  Before him, I may think aloud.  I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another.  Sincerity is the luxury allowed, but diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth as having none above it to court or conform unto.  Every man alone is sincere.  At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.  We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.  We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.  I knew a man who,[298] under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty.  At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad.  But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him.  No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms.  But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain dealing and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him.  But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back.  To stand in true relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?  We can seldom go erect.  Almost every man we meet requires some civility,—­requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him.  But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.  My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part.  A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox[299] in nature.  I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.