haunts of men, and unvexed by the intrusion of human life, is quietly and exquisitely lovely. I admire these charms of nature; I stand fascinated with gazing upon them; I pronounce their loveliness without a blemish, but I am alone while with them. There is no tenderness in my love, no warmth of sympathy in it; there is no exchange of soul. My taste is educated and refined, but I have seen no face that answers back to mine.

I want an incarnate beauty, a loveliness living and vocal, moving in the plane of intelligence, capable of appreciating and reciprocating what I feel, so that I can love and be loved after my kind. I want a being, a character, a person, a soul, to whom I can say, "Thou," and who will understand my offering when I lay down there all that I have. And I want the fairness to be exceedingly fair, the loveliness exceedingly lovely. I want to gaze and gaze and see no blemish. We all have within us an ideal of a grace and beauty that are faultless. Matching this ideal and kindled by it, we have all of us an aspiration to find and obtain this perfection, making the prize ours forever. We are looking for it on every hand all our life long, — a nature all truth and purity and gentleness and tenderness and benevolence and strength, with no false thing, no harshness, no prejudice, no fickleness, no weakness in it. Shall this ideal mock and elude us always? We question each bright face of earthly kindreds to see if it be there. We hold a moment each hand that touches ours. Is this the ideal friend, constant, loving, sympathetic, above all meanness, selfishness, deceitfulness, and mutability? We listen to each tone that

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falls upon our ear, if haply that one true heart still searched for spoke there. Where we give our love and confidence, it is as much our ideal we love and trust as anything real which our eyes have discerned, often more. We think we are looking upon the real when we have only projected out our ideal and flung its charm over the object of our gaze. And the disappointments of life come often from the growing perception that the real fails to coincide with what we thought we saw and were about to possess. Indeed, we have learned, most of us by experience, even the most favored of us, that in the real we must subtract more or less largely from the ideal, consent to imperfection, find our best friends and truest not all that we thought them, at least, not all that we could conceive, come upon qualities or limitations of qualities that demand our forbearance, even as we must ask, for ourselves, from them, large forbearance in return.

This consciousness and discernment of mutual faults makes our human friendships very tender and touching, secures many sentiments in loving hearts, the exercise of which would otherwise have found no place, sentiments of generosity, carefulness, forgiveness, and charity, but it denies to us forever our ideal. That perfect image unmated anywhere, finding amid all varieties of human life no mirror for its fairness and symmetry, comes back to our hearts, like Noah's weary dove to the ark, and hides within the chamber of our soul. We gaze upon it still, but it is only an image. We refresh ourselves by the contemplation of its surpassing attractions, but it is a picture, and no more. Is there no original for this pic

ture? Shall we never behold this image realized and vitalized? Shall this hunger for a perfect loveliness nowhere and never be satisfied? Is it merely an internal aspiration, a standard which our own soul has set up, and is it to help us only as an educating ideal, but never to gladden and enrich us as something with which we can make a close and satisfying alliance?

Let us rest this question here, unanswered, for the moment, and pass on.

We want again, as a natural and inalienable demand of the heart, a friendship that shall draw out our whole capacity of loving. The heart delights to give love, to go on giving so long as there is no check, to feel that it can give without restraint or limitation. But suppose it presently find that where it has begun to bestow love, it cannot love there any more ardently; that it has exhausted or outrun the attractive power; that it is like a forest tree growing in a box in a greenhouse, its roots hemmed in and confined by that narrow crib, and its boughs met soon by the low roof and clipped to that dwarfish standard, -roots that would pierce the earth for many a rod, seeking deep springs of remote watercourses, boughs that would rise into the mid-air and toss with a giant's strength in dalliance with the full gales of heaven. Suppose the heart awake to this consciousness that it has given to its friendships all that those friendships can command, and has yet an indefinite capacity for loving unemployed; that it could give more love and yet more, but cannot give more to these objects, outreaching and overgrowing them as a luxuriant vine outtops and overruns a

low and scanty trellis; what, then, shall comfort and portion it? What shall it do with this superfluous capacity of loving? Is it superfluous? What was it given for in such excess? Shall this fountained fulness find no outlet, and for want of channels set back and stagnate and breed the malaria of ceaseless discontent, a perpetually chafing restraint. When the heart questions, as it must if it make no positive discoveries, if it were willing to love on blindly; when it questions, as at times it cannot avoid doing, the wisdom of bestowing such vast affection upon the frail, perishable, and imperfect objects of earth, and the still outreaching vine seek something loftier and larger to climb and spread upon, that it may show what a vigor of life and productiveness is in it, shall it forever droop unsupported to the ground, and plead with all its vacant tendrils in vain?

We want, again, a friendship that can enrich us indefinitely. This is not a selfish desire so much as a noble aspiration. Being incomplete in ourselves, we seek to draw completeness from our friend. He must have what we have not. He must not fall below what we have. If he be poorer and weaker in everything than we are, he will not help us up, but will drag us down. If we choose as our friend one whom we can contain and measure on every side, we shall either some day despise him or shall sink content to his level, wronging our own more vigorous soul. He that chooses wisely chooses where he will have gain of something that he lacks. A true friendship should be mutually improving. We also may give, though we acquire. We may have something to impart

where we have much to receive in this interchange of bounty. We want a friend, therefore, whom we cannot exhaust in a day or a season, one in whom we can make new discoveries of wisdom and of worth every day, one who has something beyond still in every disclosure he makes to us of his thought and of his heart, one whom we can never fully read as we peruse a printed volume, coming at last to the end and saying, "I have finished," as we close it and lay it down. We want to feel that he gives us richly of his abundance, and that, had our want been greater, he could have given more, or that he gives all, and yet could give again, as a cloud empties itself, and passes, and returning on a changed current, pours a fresh deluge down.

But while we desire thus a superior for our friend, we want one who cannot despise us, one whose wisdom, where he is wise and we are ignorant, will bear with our ignorance; whose strength, where he is strong and we are weak, will bear with our weakness; whose address, where we are untutored, will guide and teach without humiliating us. We want to feel it safe-safe for our self-respect to show him our deficiencies, that he may supplement them, and yet not look down upon us. We have even a longing to show not only our weakness, but our corruption, to confess that we have moral diseases at heart, to beseech that we be not better thought of than we deserve. We may indeed exercise modesty and humility in our earthly friendships, but we cannot show there the evil imaginations that haunt us, lest we sully our friend's purity too. Were there one to whom even this