17.  He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes.  Let him not intermeddle with this.  Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal.  Friendship demands a religious treatment.  We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.  Reverence is a great part of it.  Treat your friend as a spectacle.  Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person.  Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand.  Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought?  To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground.  Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure instead of the noblest benefits.

18.  Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation.  Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them?  Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend?  Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters?  Why be visited by him at your own?  Are these things material to our covenant?  Leave this touching and clawing.  Let him be to me a spirit.  A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him I want, but not news, nor pottage.  I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences, from cheaper companions.  Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself?  Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook?  Let us not vilify but raise it to that standard.  That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance.  Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all.  Guard him as thy counterpart.  Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.  The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near.  To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter.  That seems to you a little.  It suffices me.  It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive.  It profanes nobody.  In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.

19.  Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening.  We must be our own before we can be another’s.  There is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb;—­you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos[304] inquinat, aequat.  To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot.  Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation.  There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.