LIKE THE STRINGS OF THE LUTE,

of which you will tighten ten before you find one that will bear the stretch and keep the pitch.”  “What an argument in favor of social connections,” says Lord Greville, “is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasures we have more.”  Horace Walpole has given clear expression to one of the chief pleasures of friendship: 

“OLD FRIENDS

are the great blessings of one’s latter years.  Half a word conveys one’s meaning.  They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking.  I have young relations that may grow upon me, for my nature is affectionate, but can they grow old friends?  My age forbids that.  Still less can they grow companions.  Is it friendship to explain half one says?  One must relate the history of one’s memory and ideas; and what is that to the young but old stories?” “Fast won, fast lost,” says Shakspeare.  Says Dr. Johnson:  “If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone.  A man should keep his friendships in constant repair!”

ALL THROUGH THE WRITINGS OF THE SAGES

on this subject there is a tinge of melancholy.  “There are no friends!” says Aristotle.  “There have been fewer friends on earth than Kings,” says the poet Cowley.  Why is this?  Let us peer into the solemn question.  The ideal of true manhood is easily formulated.  Alas! what an abyss separates a man’s daily life, as it is, from that high quality he has pictured in his imagination.  We are all the time reaching for

THINGS WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND,

and could not assimilate with if they were placed at our disposal.  In this way a weary, well-read novel-reader, worn out in all lines of light letters, enters a circulating library, and queruously asks:  “Have you any new books?” She expects a negative answer, and in that case would suffer a keen disappointment.  The man says “Yes,” and brings out several new books.  Every one of these is new in every sense.  It may be the most trivial set of pages yet printed in this era of scribblers, or, yet, it may be a great work, worthy of the attention of the thoughtful, and the commendation of the pure in heart.  Nobody can tell.  Then, illogically, she asks:  “Is this good?” or “Is that good?” and upon being reminded that she wanted something new or nothing, she asks for something by May Agnes Fleming, or Mary Jane Holmes, and goes off happy, to re-read those expressions which have so well pleased her in the past.

I think I espy in this exhibition of the working of the mind in a rude and unsatisfactory state

A GENERAL PRINCIPLE,