after one has once known "a man's limitations it is all over with him ;" that love of one's self "accuses the other party;" in other words, that if the "other party" were sufficiently high to be loved he could not love down to his lover. This is quite Emersonian, and is true enough as applied to those purely intellectual camaraderies which are, as Mr. Hamerton very clearly shows in his Intellectual Life, limited by the very nature of the case. One goes into an intellectual friendship for the sake of what one can get out of it, in the spirit indicated by Emerson; and, intellects being sadly limited, after a time the end comes, and one goes on to pastures new.

But when one comes to real friendship, which is an affair of the heart rather than of the head, calculations must cease. Friendship, like charity, "seeketh not her own;" in a wonderful sense, one gets most, in friendship, by giving most. Her true motto comes from Shakespeare, "Be sure of this, what I can help thee to thou shalt not miss." In this spirit she gives, and gives, and gives again; and in the very worst event, to her "purification becomes the joy of pain."

Three great sayings strengthen and illustrate this idea that friendship is for service, —for service rendered, not for service received. The supreme word is in that passage in the gospel where the disciples were told that whosoever lost his life for the Master's sake should find it. Shakespeare's supreme test of worthiness for manhood in love was the willingness to give and hazard all the man had. And Tennyson, when Sir Galahad would sit in the "siege perilous wherein "no man could sit but he should lose himself," makes the dauntless young knight exclaim, "If I lose myself, I save myself!" It is this selflessness, to use one of Tennyson's words, which is the glory of friendship. She is "careful for nothing;" she may be "cast down," she cannot be destroyed; she may suffer long, but she is kind.

Friendship, as God, sees down through the outward husk of circumstance, the accident of environment, which has caused petty faults and affectations, which may even have built these up into great faults or vices; she detects beneath all this that which would be better if it could, that which would have been more noble had the

environment been less belittling. She sees the flame of good at the core, which exists in us all, however tiny or feeble it be; she looks on that, and patiently fans, and fans, and fans it, never worn out, though often weary. She finds the common ground and stands there, obeying one of Mr. Ruskin's maxims in dwelling upon points of consonance rather than points of dissonance. As long as a friendship is so new as to be still discovering fresh congenialities, it grows and flourishes; by and by, upon a toilsome day, a vexation creeps in, an offense comes, and differences begin to be discovered, magnified, dwelt upon. Let one die then, and instantly the surviving friend once more dwells tenderly upon the common tastes and aspirations. I have seen this again and again, and tested it many times, until I doubt whether we ought ever to "thank God we are not as other men." If sympathy is the great bond which makes the world's work and life itself possible, surely we dare not do so.

Very many times that passes for friendship which is the sheerest self-love. Who can doubt that jealousy and wounded feeling spring chiefly from this source, and that these are the greatest killers of friendship?

I know that in writing thus of friendship I may be accused of overshooting the mark, of speaking of that grand general "love of benevolence," I think some catechism calls it, which cares for all the world alike; but this is not the case. I do not hold that it is possible to cherish the affection of which I speak, and for which I plead, equally with all the world. “It is ever with man's soul as it was with the universe; the beginning of creation is light." There must be a light, a spark struck out between spirits, a discovery of special congeniality, if you like to call it so. But this may be very slight, a mere "outward and visible sign; the rest is "inward and spiritual grace," and "the soul, of its own beauty, will lend beauty to whatsoever it looks on with love," or, better still, it will find the beauty which is already there ; for, in a sense beyond this special sense which forms the original bond of friendship, we are all at one if the soul's sight is keen enough to see it. After all, is not the power to forgive a test of genuine friendship?

What the Friend said of Forgive

ness.

The noblesse oblige principle is often most cruel and unrelenting in its constructions and applications, and perhaps never more so than in the current distribution of forgiveness. I see that we are forgiven by our friends only for what is adjudged by them to be our own class of failing, our individual bent in sinning. To illustrate the habitually careful and trusty are not easily pardoned even a single lapse into carelessness, while some notorious disregarder of every charge given him is pardoned seventy times seven times. Again, any one instance of disingenuousness in the habitually truthful is never even forgotten, while the pleasant liar pursues his profession with no reprimand beyond the genial recognition of his mendacity. If gentleness becomes violent or good nature becomes irritable, on some occasion of great stress, what a miracle of apostasy! Yet violence and irritability, unchecked, keep their own seats in the chimney-corner. From all which might be deduced a rule advantageous to self-seeking humanity only insist sufficiently upon your own special and favorite fault by its familiar repetition, or by defending it as a matter of "temperament" or in some way of individual prerogative, and by so insisting you shall find that any special instances of your baseness, treachery, abuse of power, or aught besides will be treated to a palliation never accorded to the one-time of fender in the same line of misconduct.

The so-regarded "faultless character" is ever at a great disadvantage in this one respect so sensitive are his associates for

the preservation of their criterion (himself) that they cannot endure disappointment in the least article of the catalogued virtues which they have set to his credit, oftentimes despite his honest protest against apotheosis at their hands. What is the result if any little human deflection is discovered in him? "So good that we cannot forgive him!" might be the summing-up expression of their attitude towards any such sporadic and unaccountable case of error or of failure. Is it that as one's excellence is great, so is the degree of his chance offense great and unforgivable, although in the inveterate practicer the offense would be scarcely an appreciable fact? I dare say there is some adroit sophistry which would explain why the springs of charity should flow with lethean tenderness over the transgression of the perpetual offender, whilst these same springs congeal and hold in merciless crystalline display the occasional lapses of the habitually upright, generous, and just. That Florentine potentate quoted by Bacon in the essay on Revenge seems to whisper significantly in my ear, as he observes that whereas we are commanded to forgive our enemies, we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends.

I cannot help thinking that the sacred Word which tells us there is more joy over the one returning sinner than over the ninety and nine that went not astray is often sadly strained to indulge the sinner, while the balance is kept by showing, in a corresponding degree, austerity towards the ninety and nine.

THE DIAL PERIOD.

In reading the invaluable Memoirs of Emerson by Mr. Cabot, those who knew how intimate were the relations between the Concord poet - philosopher and his younger neighbor, the poet-naturalist, must have been surprised to see how little Thoreau is mentioned there. Only two pages out of eight hundred treat distinctly of Henry Thoreau and are specified in the index; and though Dr. Emerson's pleasing volume concerning his father and his Concord friends deals more liberally with Thoreau and his brother John, yet no hint is given that a copious and important correspondence went on between Emerson and Thoreau at two different periods, in the year 1843, when Thoreau assisted in editing the Dial, and in 1847-48, when Emerson was in England, and Thoreau, dwelling in the Emerson family at Concord, entertained the traveler with domestic news very dear to the affectionate husband and father. These letters have been in my hands for ten years past, and there seems to be no reason now why they should not be given to the

1 The earliest note which I find from Emerson to Thoreau bears no date, but was doubtless written in 1840 or 1841, for at no later time could the persons named in it have visited Concord together. Thoreau must have been living with his father and mother in the Parkman house, where the Library now stands.

MY DEAR HENRY, We have here G. P. Bradford, R. Bartlett, G. W. Lippitt, C. S.

public. They will, I think, open a new view of Thoreau's character to those readers — perhaps the majority — who fancy him a reserved, stoical, and unsympathetic person. In editing the small collection of Thoreau's letters which he made in 1865, three years after the writer's death, Emerson included only one of the epistles to himself in the year 1843, though several of those addressed to Mrs. Emerson from Staten Island were published. I shall omit this printed letter, while giving Emerson's letter to which it is a reply.1

In the early part of 1843 Thoreau was still living in Emerson's family, of which he became an inmate in April, 1841, and to which he returned in the autumn of 1847, after closing the chapter of his Walden hermit-life. In the first of the following letters he returns his thanks to Emerson for the hospitality thus afforded; and I have no doubt that a beautiful poem called The Departure, which I first printed in the Boston Commonwealth in the year following Thoreau's death, was written twenty years before-in 1843-to commemorate his first separation from that friendly

Wheeler, and Mr. Alcott. Will you not come down and spend an hour?

household when he went, in the spring of 1843, to reside as tutor in the family of Mr. William Emerson, at Staten Island, N. Y. The letter numbered I., however, was written by Thoreau in the Emerson household at Concord to Emerson at Staten Island, or perhaps in New York, where he was that winter giving a course of lectures.

In explanation of the passages concerning Bronson Alcott, in this letter, it should be said that he was then living at the Hosmer Cottage, in Concord, with his English friends, Charles Lane and Henry Wright, and that he had refused to pay a tax to support what he considered an unjust government, and was arrested by the deputy sheriff, Sam Staples, in consequence.

1. THOREAU TO EMERSON.

CONCORD, January 24, 1843. DEAR FRIEND, - The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right. I had not spoken of writing to you, but as you say you are about to write to me when you get my letter, I make haste on my part in order to get yours the sooner. I don't well know what to say to earn the forthcoming epistle, unless that Edith takes rapid strides in the arts and sciences or music and natural history — as well as over the carpet; that she says "papa" less and less abstractedly every day, looking in my face,

which may sound like a Ranz des Vaches to yourself. And Ellen declares every morning that "papa may come home to-night;" and by and by it will have changed to such positive statement as that "papa came home larks night."

Elizabeth Hoar still flits about these clearings, and I meet her here and there, and in all houses but her own, but as if I were not the less of her family for all that. I have made slight acquaintance also with one Mrs. Lidian Emerson, who almost persuades me to be a Christian, but I fear I as often lapse into heathenism. Mr. O'Sullivan

We

was here three days. I met him at the Atheneum [Concord], and went to Hawthorne's [at the Old Manse] to tea with him. He expressed a great deal of interest in your poems, and wished me to give him a list of them, which I did; he saying he did not know but he should notice them. He is a rather puny-looking man, and did not strike me. had nothing to say to one another, and therefore we said a great deal! He, however, made a point of asking me to write for his Review, which I shall be glad to do. He is, at any rate, one of the not-bad, but does not by any means take you by storm, no, nor by calm, which is the best way. He expects to see you in New York. After tea I carried him and Hawthorne to the Ly

ceum.

Mr. Alcott has not altered much since you left. I think you will find him much the same sort of person. With Mr. Lane I have had one regular chat à la George Minott, which of course was greatly to our mutual grati- and edi fication; and, as two or three as regular conversations have taken place since, I fear there may have been a precession of the equinoxes. Mr. Wright, according to the last accounts, is in Lynn, with uncertain aims and prospects, maturing slowly, perhaps, as indeed are all of I suppose they have told you how near Mr. Alcott went to the jail, but I can add a good anecdote to the rest. When Staples came to collect Mrs. Ward's taxes, my sister Helen asked him what he thought Mr. Alcott meant, what his idea was, and he answered, "I vum, I believe it was nothing but principle, for I never heard a man talk honester."

us.