just as potent in the mighty brain of Sir Isaac Newton or of Louis Agassiz.  Man idealizes the affair of friendship.  He forgets whether he really wants it or not, and then persistently inquires for it.  It is not in the library of possibilities.  He therefore goes off angry and disappointed.  Could he get a glimpse at it, I am afraid he would walk away satisfied with something more nearly en rapport with his nature and his habits.  Let us view this golden word friendship as man idealizes it:  Being a changeable thing, he views friendship (of which he knows nothing), entirely by comparison with something of which in its turn he knows but little.  This something is always a mother’s love for her son, notorious as the strongest affection shown by our species.  He therefore doubles up this marvelous fact of a mother’s love, and creates in his imagination a reciprocatory agency co-respondent to this mother’s love.  Now, with this magnificent product of invention, he goes forth into the world, seeking for some man upon whom he may bestow a mother’s love (of which the “bestower” is entirely incapable), and who will, in payment, respond with a mother’s love (of which that man would, of course, be also incapable).  In the jargon of electricity a positive and a negative are absolutely necessary to electric energy.

A MOTHER’S LOVE

is a deplorably one-sided action, but it is the highest and noblest of the faculties of affection.  Anything beyond it is ideal, made up of two positives, and a thousand years ahead of us.  Is it any wonder that when man makes his experiments with the mother’s love which he supposes himself capable of bestowing that a universal wail arises, or that Shakspeare, the greatest of mortal minds, brought in those awful verdicts against mankind—­“Lear” and “Timon of Athens”?

I THINK THAT IS WHY

the very deepest philosophers grow sad when they touch the question of friendship.  The problem is itself the saddest of commentaries upon the weakness of our higher faculties.  Separate man from his wife and family and view him in his relations to other persons similarly placed, and the result is not only unsatisfactory, but distressing to a mind anxious to hold to a good opinion of humanity.  Put to the right test the quality of human friendship is found to be highly strained—­to be liable to curdle in the first thundershower—­to sour upon the sensitive stomach.  We at once behold mankind forced to flee to God’s kind institution of the family and the home to escape a desolation of the heart which follows fruitless efforts to kindle a blaze out of the damp driftwood of life’s general associations.

Now, what is possible?  Spot friendship is possible, and delightful.  “To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.”  Man is a social animal.  He “gregates,” he flocks.  Of nothing am I fonder than the sparkle of a friend’s eye, and the gabble of half an hour, or three hours.  But I ought not to build on any future gabbles, for, to-morrow, lo! my friend may have discovered my ignoble reality, whereas he has heretofore been shaking hands with my noble ideality.