20.  What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can.  Let us be silent,—­so we may hear the whisper of the gods.  Let us not interfere.  Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say anything to such?  No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland.  There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous.  Wait, and thy heart shall speak.  Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips.  The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.  You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.  If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye.  We see the noble afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude?  Late,—­very late,—­we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire,—­but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they.  In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men.  Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

21.  The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood.  We walk alone in the world.  Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.  But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.  We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage,[305] of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands.  Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be.  Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.  By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great.  You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as specters and shadows merely.