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Title: The Friendships of Women

Author: William Rounseville Alger

Release Date: September 8, 2006 [EBook #19199]

Language: English

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THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN.

THE
FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN
BY
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.

A GENTLE BUSINESS AND BECOMING
THE ACTION OF GOOD WOMEN.
Shakespeare.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1868.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867 by
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court
of the District of Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGE:
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON.

TO
ANNA CABOT LODGE,
A TRUE AND GENEROUS FRIEND,
THIS BOOK
IS INSCRIBED WITH THE DEEPEST SENTIMENTS OF ESTEEM
AND GRATITUDE

PREFACE.

A STATEMENT of the facts in which this book began may gratify the
curiosity of some of its readers.

While gathering materials for a History of Friendship, I was often
struck both by the small number of recorded examples of the sentiment
among women, which were discovered in my researches, and by the
commonness of the expressed belief, that strong natural obstacles
make friendship a comparatively feeble and rare experience with them.
Spurred by further thought, as well as by many talks, I kept on
exploring the subject. At length, so much matter was mustered that I
determined to insert in my work a distinct chapter on the Friendships
of Women. Still the subject grew in interest for me, and the bulk of
historic illustration swelled beyond the size of a chapter. Then I
decided to make a little treatise of it by itself.

The principle and sentiment of friendship deserve a much larger share
of the attention given, alike in the life and the literature of our
time, to the passion of love. One would infer from most of the
popular writings of the day, that love is the only emotion worthy of
notice. But surely there are in human nature other feelings, which
demand far more culture than they generally receive, feelings which
really play an important part in human life, and which ought to play
a still more important part. Am I deceived in thinking, that, in
particular, the place of friendship in the Live; of women is a
subject which, if soundly discussed, and set forth with mastery and
sympathy, may give precious guidance, comfort, and inspiration to
thousands of embittered and languishing souls? Will not the large
number, who are denied the satisfactions of impassioned love, be
grateful for a book which shows them what rich and noble resources
they may find in his widely different, though closely kindred,
sentiment? Is not such a book especially needed at he present time?

In method of treatment, I have, without neglecting moral analysis or
reflective exposition, even greater prominence to biographic
narrative, living presentation of instances from which the reader may
draw the befitting lessons of the topic, and apply them for personal
profit. Poetry, it has been said, is balm on the wounds of non-
fulfilment in our lives. When our own experience and imagination are
wanting in that balm, we must borrow it from others. If we muse, with
open heart, on the enthusiastic dreams and fruitions of more richly
impassioned or more happily placed natures, the contagious glow of
their affections may enkindle ours. This is one of the highest uses
of art, a use which puts on artists the duty of setting before their
patrons sights of righteousness and bliss, trust and peace, rather
than sights of wretchedness, wrangling, doubt, and error.

In conjoined importance and interest, to those who have a taste for
it, no other study can compare with the study of human nature and
human experience, as illustrated in individual examples. If the
students are curious as to the secrets of greatness, and are emulous
of excellence, the attraction is enhanced when they deal with persons
of extraordinary powers and careers. It then becomes fascinating.
Beautiful and noble characters can find nothing so enchanting as a
beautiful and noble character. It was truly said by Vauvenargues,
"Sooner or later, we enjoy only souls." These pages will present
portrayals of a large number of charming souls, with accounts of
their happiest experiences. For our poor human heart, there will
always be a bewitchment about the memories of those persons who were
either remarkable for their power of drawing affection or were
signalized by their enjoyment of the boon. Many a rare character,
otherwise long ago consumed in the alembic of time, will long
continue to be fondly singled out and studied. So when the famous
Marchioness of Salisbury was accidentally burned to death, the
Skeleton was known as hers only by the jewels with which she had been
decked.

It may be dangerous to overlook ignorantly what is false and hateful
in society; but it is pernicious to pick out such objects for
exclusive or permanent scrutiny. The most wholesome results are
likely to be secured by the fastening of our attention prevailingly
on what is true and fair and blessed in our fellow-beings. Such a
choice will commend itself to the best spirits; for, while it is the
spontaneous movement of a mean nature to contract and swoop, a
generous nature prefers to expand and soar. The vulture pounces on
rottenness with a cry of obscene satisfaction; but the lark seeks the
sunrise with a song of worship. So let the ingenuous mind, studying
human character and life, bestow a shunning glance at evil, a fixed
gaze on good. So, should any one wish to write a history of the
enmities of women, for which, doubtless, the materials are ample, I
willingly yield him the task, appropriating only the privilege of
doing justice to their friendships.

In the present volume, my first and constant purpose has been boldly
to state the truth just as it is, to do justice to the facts of the
subject. My second purpose has been to be of use, to give help and
comfort. In whatever degree poetry and ideal sentiment may be
accompaniments, neither of them has in any sense been made an aim of
the work. While freely allowing his mind to shine into his pen, and
his heart to flow through it, the writer has adopted every precaution
to prevent or correct all those refractions of ignorance and
prejudice, and all that coloring of morbid sentimentality, which
would stand in the way of truth and use. In treating such a theme as
friendship, the worst dangers are hardness and levity on the one
extreme, exaggeration and mawkishness on the other, and cowardice and
squeamishness between. These faults, it is hoped, are not chargeable
on the following pages.

This book is a book of goodness. It is devoted to the nurture of
those benign virtues which it so plainly shows waiting on and winning
the best beauty and joy of the world. Small causes can bring about
great effects, when time and facts conspire to help them. A cocoanut,
tossed by the waves into a little sand on a rock amidst the ocean,
has been known to strike root, and to form the centre of a luxuriant
island of palms. Unable to look for any such striking result from the
influence of this work, I shall be happy, indeed, if the power of the
examples to which I have here given voice shall demonstrate the other
side of the deep thought penned by Shakespeare: One good deed, dying
tongueless, Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

HAVE WOMEN NO FRIENDSHIPS?

FRIENDSHIP INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE TIES OF BLOOD

FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN

FRIENDSHIPS OF MOTHERS AND SONS

Cornelia and the Gracchi.
Olympias and Alexander.
Monica and Augustine.
John Quincy Adams and His Mother.
Goethe and his Mother.
The Humboldts and their Mother.
Guizot and his Mother.

FRIENDSHIPS OF DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS

Tullia and Cicero.
Margaret Roper and Sir Thomas More.
Agnes and William Wirt.
Mary and John Evelyn.
Theodosia and Aaron Burr.
Maria and Richard Edgeworth.
Madame de Staël and Necker.
Letitia Landon and her Father.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS AND BROTHERS

Narcissus and his Reflection.
Electra and Orestes.
Antigone and Polynices.
Diana and Apollo.
Scholastica and Benedict.
Cornelia and Tasso.
Margaret and Francis.
Mary and Sir Philip Sidney.
Catherine and Robert Boyle.
Caroline and William Herschel.
Letitia and John Aikin.
Cornelia and Goethe.
Lena and Jacobi.
Lucile and Chateaubriand.
Charlotte and Schleiermacher.
Dorothy and Wordsworth.
Augusta and Byron.
Mary and Charles Lamb.
Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn.
Whittier and his Sister.
Eugénie and Maurice de Guérin.

FRIENDSHIPS OF WIVES AND HUSBANDS.

Count and Countess del Verme.
Lady and Sir James Mackintosh.
Aspasia and Pericles.
Portia and Brutus.
Arria and Pertus.
Paulina and Seneca.
Calpurnia and Pliny.
Timoxena and Plutarch.
Castara and Habington.
Faustina and Zappi.
Jeanne and Roland.
Caroline and Herder.
Lucy and John Hutchinson.
Sarah and John Austin.
Elizabeth and Robert Browning.
Leopold Schefer and his Wife.
John Stuart Mill and his Wife.
Lady and Lord William Russell.
Artemisia and Mausolus.
Moomtaza and Jehan.

PLATONIC LOVE; THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS

Relative Prevalence of Vice in our day.
Moral Influence of Friendships between Men and Women.
Analysis of Platonic Love.
Laura and Petrarch.
Beatrice and Dante.
Heloise and Abelard.
Danger and Safety of Platonic Love.
Countess Matilda and Hildebrand.
The "Woldemar" of Jacobi.
Influence of Chivalry in developing Friendships of Men and Women.
Causes of Prominent Social Position of Women in France.
Friendships in Catholic Church between Women and their Directors.
Olympias and Chrysostom.
Paula and Jerome.
Clara and Francis of Assissi.
Chantal and Francis of Sales.
Guion and Lacombe.
La Maisonfort and Fenelon.
Cornuau and Bossuet.
Theresa and John of the Cross.
The Friendship of Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo.
Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Pélisson.
Madame de Sévigné and Corbinelli.
Madame de la Fayette and Rochefoucauld.
Madame du Deffand and D'Alembert.
Mademoiselle Lespinasse and D'Alembert.
Madame de Staël and Montmorency.
Magdalen Herbert and Dr. Donne.
Lady Masham and John Locke.
Mary Unwin and Cowper.
Mrs. Clive and Garrick.
Hannah More and Langhorne.
Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott.
Duchess of Devonshire and Fox.
Duchess of Gordon and Dr. Beattie.
Charlotte and Humboldt.
Bettine and Goethe.
Goethe's Treatment of Women in his Life and in his Works.
Princess of Homburg and Marchioness di Barolo and
	Silvio Pellico.
Isabel Fenwick and Wordsworth.
Harriet Martineau and Channing.
Lucy Aikin and Channing.
Frances Power Cobbe and Theodore Parker.
Friendships of Women and their Tutors.
Zenobia and Longinus.
Countess of Pembroke and Daniel.
Princess Elizabeth and Descartes.
Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz.
Lady Jane Grey and Elmer.
Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton.
Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier.
Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer.
Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson.
Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson.
Countess Ranelagh and Milton.
Duchess of Queensbury and Gay.
Relations with Women, of Sophocles, Virgil,
	Frauenlob, Bernadin
St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Jean Paul Richter.
Rahel Levin and her Friendships with Men.
Madame Récamier and her Friendships with Men.
Elizabeth Barrett, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and John Kenyon.
Clotilde de Vaux and Auguste Comte.
Madame Swetchine and her Friendships with Men.

FRIENDSHIPS OF MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan
Madame de Rambouillet and Julie d'Angenne
Mrs. Browne and Felicia Hemans.
Naomi and Ruth.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS

Dido and Anna.
Hannah and Martha More.
Mary and Agnes Berry.
Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte.
Joanna and Agnes Baillie.

FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMAN WITH WOMAN

Treatment of Female Friendship in Literature.
School-girl Friendships.
Friendships in Conventual Life.
Jeanne Philippon and Angélique Boufflers.
Agnes Arnauld and Jacqueline Pascal.
Madame de Longueville and Angélique Arnauld.
Friendships between Queens and their Maids of Honor.
Sakoontali and Anastiya.
Marie de Medicis and Eleanora Galigäi.
Queen Philippa and Philippa Picard.
Lady Jane Beaufort and Catherine Douglas.
Mary Stuart and her Four Marys.
Queen Elizabeth and her Attendants.
Queen Anne and Sarah Jennings.
Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe.
Queen Hortense and Madame de Faverolles.

PAIRS OF FEMALE FRIENDS

Beatrice Portinari and Giovanna.
Dorothea Sydney and Sophia Murray.
Katherine Phillips and Regina Collier.
Elizabeth Rowe and the Countess of Hertford.
Countess of Pomfret and Countess of Hertford.
Lady Harley and Mrs. Montague.
Hannah More and Mrs. Garrick.
Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot.
Charlotte Smith and Lady O'Niel.
Anna Seward and Honora Sneyd.
The Countess of Northesk and Anna Seward.
Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby,
	the Ladies of Llangollen.
Fanny Burney and Mrs. Thrale.
Günderode and Bettine Brentano.
Miss Benger and Lucy Aikin.
Lucy Aikin and Joanna Baillie.
Mrs. Hemans and Miss Jewshury.
Mary Mitford and Mrs. Browning.
Madame de Staid and Madame Récamier.
Madame Swetchine and the Countess Edling.
Countess D'Ossoli and the Marchioness Arconati.
The Duchess of Orleans and her Lady Companion.

THE NEEDS AND DUTIES OF WOMAN IN THIS AGE

Evils and Defects of Society and their Remedy.
The Ideal of Marriage.
Public Life versus Domestic Life.
Caste: Diminution of its Influence.
The Common Destiny, and the Peculiar Destiny, of Woman.
Life in the Harems of the East.
Right of Woman to every form of Education and Labor.
Grounds of the exclusion of Women from Public Life
The Right of Women to engage in Politics.
The Inexpediency of their doing so
Impartial Consideration of both sides of the Question.
Morality, eternal; Politics, temporary.
Gradual historic Emancipation of Woman.
Comparative Condition of Woman in the Oriental, the Classic,
the early Christian, and the Modern World.
Relation of Mohammed and of Jesus to Women.
Light thrown on the Condition of Women in Greece by the
History of Sappho.
Sentiment of Chivalry towards Woman.
Woman ennobled by sharing in great public Interests.
Decline of Letter-writing in our day.
Duty of Women to cultivate Conversation.
Duty of Women to cultivate the art of Manners.
Value of model Types of Women.
Disinterestedness, the Redemption of Man.
Woman as seen in Mythology.
Conclusion of the matter.
Friendship in the Future.


THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN.

INTRODUCTION.

THE peculiar mission of woman, it has been said, is to be a wife and
mother. Is it not as truly the peculiar mission of man to be a
husband and father? If she is called to add to the happiness and
worth of her husband, he is called to add to the happiness and worth
of his wife. They are alike bound to protect and educate their
children. And the other duties, the private improvement of self and
the public improvement of society rest on them in common. The
assertion, then, that the distinctive Office of woman is to be the
helpmeet of man, does not imply that she ought to be legally or
morally any more subservient to him than he to her; for the supreme
duty of a woman, as of every other human being, is, through the
perfecting of her own nature as a child of God, to fulfil her
personal destiny in the universe. To love, to marry, to rear a
family, is by no means an entire statement of the obligations and
privileges of women: because no woman always has lover, husband, or
children; many fail to have all of them in succession; and a few
never have either of them.

In some of these cases the domestic appointment of woman is defeated;
but her personal destiny may still De achieved. The qualities of her
soul and the fruitions of her life, as a free individual, may be
perfected in spite of this relative mutilation in her lot. The
growing desire in our time for show and luxury, the increase of the
excitements of publicity, the sensational literature of fiction,
which is absorbing an ever-larger share of attention from the more
sensitive portion of the feminine public, these causes are
concentrating an undue interest on the passion of love. It is the
almost exclusive theme of plays, novels, poems. One consequence is an
exaggeration of the part that should be played by this sentiment in
the experience of the individual. It comes to be the engrossing
subject of regard. Life is considered a failure, unless it contains
love, followed by marriage; yet it must often be deprived of this
experience. In the most civilized countries, especially in their
brilliant capitals, a higher and higher ratio of women miss of happy
love and marriage.

There never were many morally baffled, uneasy, and complaining women
on the earth as now; because never before did the capacities of
intelligence and affection so greatly exceed their gratifications.
New perceptions are the scouts of fresh desires; fresh desires
precede their own fulfilment: a just reconciliation is a slow,
historic process. The lives of a multitude of women all around us
contain a large element of unsuccessful outward or inward ambitions,
vain attempts and prayers. This drives them back upon themselves,
into a deeper and sadder seclusion than that naturally imposed by
their housekeeping and their historic withdrawment from the bustling
businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of
instances, a tragedy not less severe than unobtrusive is enacted, the
tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs
exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The
proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself
in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of
defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase
of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements,
arrangements both more economical and more truthful. In the mean
time, every thing which tends to inflame the exclusive passion of
love, to stimulate thought upon it, or to magnify its imagined
importance, contributes so much to enhance the misery of its
withholding or loss, and thus to augment an evil already lamentably
extensive and severe.

Now, the most healthful and effective antidote for the evils of an
extravagant passion is to call into action neutralizing or
supplementary passions; to balance the excess of one power by
stimulating weaker powers, and fixing attention on them; to assuage
disappointments in one direction by securing gratifications in
another. Accordingly, the offices of friendship in the lives of
women, lives often so secluded, impoverished, and self-devouring, is
a subject of emphatic timeliness; promising, if properly treated, to
yield lessons of no slight practical value. This vein of sentiment
has suffered unmerited neglect among us. No other vein of sentiment
in human nature, perhaps, has so much need to be cherished. In the
lives of women, friendship is, First, the guide to love; a
preliminary stage in the natural development of affection. Secondly,
it is the ally of love; the distributive tendrils and branches to the
root and trunk of affection. Thirdly, it is, in some cases, the
purified fulfilment and repose into which love subsides, or rises.
Fourthly, it is, in other cases, the comforting substitute for love.
A just display of these points, in the light of an accurate analysis,
aided by the appropriate learning, can hardly fail to repay the study
it will require. The insight into the nature and the working of the
affections, to be secured by a careful study of the subject, should
be a precious acquisition of knowledge easily convertible into power.
The activity of the sympathies enkindled by tracing the biographical
sketches of a large number of the richest and most winsome examples
of feminine friendship preserved for us in history, should bestow a
rare pleasure. And the plain directions to be deduced from the
discussion and the narratives should furnish a store of instruction
for the wiser guidance of personal experience.

The writer, as he is about to intrust his book upon that current of
literature which flows by the doors of all the intelligent, bearing
its offerings to their hands, is quite aware that the subject of the
rights and the wrongs, the joys and the griefs, the hopes and the
fears, the duties and the plans, belonging to the outer and inner
life of womankind in the present age, happens just now to be one of
the chief matters of popular interest and agitation. This, however,
has had no influence in leading him to treat the subject. It has long
been in his mind. He has been drawn to investigate it and write on it
simply by its intrinsic attractions for him. But the extent and
earnestness with which the public mind is preoccupied by the social
and political discussions of the theme, going on in all quarters,
much increase the difficulty of treating it, as is here proposed,
from the scholarly, moral, and experimental point of view, with
perfect candor and calmness, and with a careful avoidance of
prejudices, exaggerations, and declamatory appeals. Demagogues and
partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private
passion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent
epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical
arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of
those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the
hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every
extremity, and keep in the golden mean of truth and use.

Such a one is also least likely to secure popular praise. The extreme
conclusions, peppery rhetoric, and passionate declamation of the
leaders on both sides, who aim at sensation and victory, are surest
to awaken the enthusiasm of the extremists, who always direct the
admiring gaze of heir parasites to the favorite representatives of
their own party, their scorn to the favorite representatives of the
other party. But under such circumstances, by is much as the
moderation of impartiality and of a patient search for the exact
truth is hard to be kept, an unlikely to win popularity, it is the
more a duty, and the surer to bear good fruits of service to the
public. There is a fashionable habit of laughing or sneering at the
illusions of the young, a habit usually mistimed and injurious. For
an illusion is as real as a truth. Every phenomenon implies truth,
however incorrectly t may be understood. An illusion is, in fact, but
a reality misinterpreted. Harmless, joy-breeding illusions are the
magic coloring of our existence. They should be cultivated rather
than rudely driven away.

The dry critic who daily labors, and with success, to destroy them,
may be knowing; but he is not wise. Every seeming acquisition really
impoverishes him. The noble Mendelssohn once said, "Life without
illusions is only death." The illusions of high and guileless hearts
are the blessed hopes created by generous faiths fastening on the
better aspects of truth. They are to our experience what the
tremulous iridescence is to the neck of the dove. To allow, as we
grow old, a sinister gaze at the sterner aspects of truth to banish
these rich and kindly illusions, is a wretched folly, however much it
may dress itself as wisdom. There are lures and deceits, enchanting
at an early period, which, at a later one, ought to be outgrown, seen
through and left behind, but not with arid and scoffing conceit. The
way to escape sadness, when the light of one beautiful promise after
another goes out, is to kindle in place thereof the light of one
glorious reality after another. If the gathered experience we carry
at evening renders worthless many things we prized in the morning, it
should also give preciousness to many things unvalued then.

When the fallen torch of ambition has smouldered into blackness, we
ought to make the eternal star of religion our guide. To take
spiritual treasures away without replacing them by better ones is
robbery. The cynical authors who deal chiefly in ridicule and satire,
or in what they call solid facts, the alternate levity and bitterness
of whose writings tend to destroy all ingenuous faith and glowing
affection, all magnanimous sympathies and hopes, seem to me to be
engaged in as miserable a business as those African hunters who train
falcons to dart on gazelles, and pick out their beautiful eyes. The
illusiveness of life that results from teeming love and trust is as a
mist of gold sifted into the atmosphere, through which all the
objects of our regard loom, colossal and glittering. As we advance in
years, we should indeed learn to recognize, and make allowance for,
this refraction and these tints, but without ceasing to enjoy the
beautiful aggrandizement they bestow. When there is danger that a
character will melt into a mere mush of ungirt feelings, the
astringent and bracing use of satire is fit. The application of a
fleecing nonchalance or of a jibing scorn to a soul of strong and
ardent sentiment, is unfit. A certain divinity should hedge every
manifestation of trustful affection, even though it be misjudged. It
is for the most part profane to scoff an overstretched or misplaced
admiration: it calls rather for a considerate instruction which shall
tenderly set it right.

It is insipidity of the feelings that gives rise to sentimentality,
as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure
of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective
earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative
treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality,
frozen under the cutting breath of derision, resembles that loathsome
ice-lake of poison in the Scandinavian hell. Sentimentality, fired by
the glorious contagion of self-forgetful admiration and loyalty, is
raised into sentiment, or even divinized into enthusiasm. The author
will devote his best endeavor to do justice to both sides of the
subject treated in his book, taking warning from the partisans who
fix an exclusive attention on that aspect of it which they
respectively prefer. He will try to set down such true thoughts in
such a pure spirit, as, instead of drying up in his readers the
springs of generous faith, and disenchanting them of all romantic
expectation, will leave them at the end with a higher estimate of the
worth of human nature and of the sweetness of human life.

Ever so correct a perception of what we despise and detest leaves our
moral rank undetermined; but the measure of what we love and admire
is the measure of our own worth. It should never be forgotten, that
the most delicate and enduring pleasures we enjoy are those we give.
It should always be remembered, that, while the proud demand honor,
and the humble seek sympathy, there is a self-respectful affection,
neither haughty nor cringing, which will always earn honor, but never
stop to ask it, always enjoy sympathy, but never be dependent on it.
This whole book is a demonstration of the truth, that, however much
woman may need deliverance from some outward trials and disabilities,
her grand want is a freer, deeper, richer, holier, inward life. Let
her, if she so please, reach out for the ballot, enter on a larger
range of work and responsibility. But let her not be blind to the
truth, that her foremost, weightiest need is a more thorough
intellectual possession and moral fulfilment of herself, leading to a
closer union with friends and an absolute surrender to God. The just
formula for the aims of woman, as it seems to me, is neither, on the
one hand, limitation to domestic life; nor, on the other hand,
devotion to public life as an end; but, dedication to the duties and
joys of family and social life, and to the nurture of the personal
inner life, as the true ends, and a free participation in the grand
interests of public life, as a means of purifying the domestic and
the inner life from selfish littlenesses, and enriching the
experience of the individual with the wide obligations and hopes of
humanity at large. Not domestic life alone; not public life alone;
not merely domestic life and public life together; but domestic life
and public life, for the sake of the personal inner life, purified
and aggrandized by the ideal appropriation of the essential
experience and progress of the whole world.

This, with such allowances as the distinction of sex really requires,
should be the aim of every woman as well as of every man. If this
view be correct, it is plain how great and vital an interest it gives
to the theme of the present work; the friendship of women; since the
very ground and gist of a noble friendship is the cultivation in
common of the personal inner lives of those who partake in it, their
mutual reflection of souls and joint sharing of experience inciting
them to a constant betterment of their being and their happiness.

HAVE WOMEN NO FRIENDSHIPS?

SOME men think women unfitted for friendship. Feminine hearts are so
complex, changeable, elusive, that the belief has had great currency
among themselves as well as with their critics. In comparing the two
sexes in this particular, many persons commit a gross error by
overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine
characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not
affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every
day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his
poem on the Characters of Women:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
Most women have no characters at all.

This want of character is held by many thoughtful men for what
Coleridge asserted it to be, the perfection of a woman; as
tastelessness proves the purity of water; transparency, that of
glass. Plausible ground for this view is furnished by the fact, that
the perfection of fine and noble manners the peculiar province of
feminine genius consists in the absence of egotism, in that chaste
and lustrous exuberance of sympathetic joy which results from the
opposite of all personal domination; namely, spontaneous obedience to
the whole law of duty. Nevertheless, the opinion is unsound; partly
untrue, partly inadequate. It results from the despotic selfhood of
man, who wishes not to reflect another, but only to be reflected. The
absence of fixed individuality makes one a readier mirror; and man,
as the historic master, desires the woman who confronts him to be, at
least apparently, the yielding subject of his will. But since woman
is an independent being, endowed with a separate responsibleness, she
has a distinct personal destiny to fulfil as much as he has, and
should be granted an equal freedom of individuality.

The perfection of a woman in the sight of God is one thing: her
irresistible charmingness to selfish man may be quite another thing.
If the latter requires a soft compliance, involving the absence of
will, the former is not irreconcilable with the firmest constancy of
individual traits; and, in fact, women can no more be lumped together
in level community, either by positives or by negatives, than men can
be. Those differ from each other as widely as these do. Accuracy of
thought has seldom been more recklessly offered up to pungency of
expression than in the above-cited aphorism of Pope. There is an
ample variety of tenacious womanly characters between the extremes
marked by Miriam beating her timbrels, and Cleopatra applying the
asp; Cornelia showing her Roman jewels, and Guyon rapt in God;
Lucrezia Borgia raging with bowl and dagger, and Florence Nightingale
sweetening the memory of the Crimean war with philanthropic deeds.
What group of men indeed can be brought together, more distinct in
individuality, more contrasted in diversity of traits and destiny,
than such women as Eve in the Garden of Eden, Mary at the foot of the
cross, Rebecca by the well, Semiramis on her throne, Ruth among the
corn, Jezebel in her chariot, Lais at a banquet, Joan of Arc in
battle, Tomyris striding over the field with the head of Cyrus in a
bag of blood, Perpetua smiling on the lions in the amphitheatre,
Martha cumbered with much service, Pocahontas under the shadow of the
woods, Saint Theresa in the convent, Madame Roland on the scaffold,
Mother Agnes at Port Royal, exiled De Staël wielding her pen as a
sceptre, and Mrs. Fry lavishing her existence on outcasts!

In searching for the friendships of women, it is difficult at first
to find striking examples. Their lives are so private, their
dispositions are so modest, their experiences have been so little
noticed by history, that the annals of the feminine heart are for the
most part a secret chapter. But a sufficiently patient search will
cause a beautiful multitude of such instances to reveal themselves.
Nothing, perhaps, will strike the literary investigator of the
subject more forcibly than the frequency with which he meets the
expressed opinion, that women really have few or no friendships; that
with them it must be either love, hate, or nothing. A writer in one
of our popular periodicals has recently ventured this dogmatic
assertion: "If the female mind were not happily impervious to logic,
we might demonstrate, even to its satisfaction, that the history of
the sex presents no single instance of a famous friendship." Before
we get through our work, we shall meet with abundant confutations of
this rash and uncomplimentary statement.

Swift says, "To speak the truth, I never yet knew a tolerable woman
to be fond of her own sex." The statement, if taken with too wide a
meaning, might have been refuted by the sight, under his eyes, of the
cordial and life-long affection of Miss Johnson and Lady Gifford, the
sister of Sir William Temple. He could not expect a Stella and a
Vanessa to be friends: an exclusive love for a common object
inevitably made them deadly rivals. But the author of "Gulliver's
Travels" was a keen observer; his maxims have always a basis in fact;
and it is undoubtedly true that women of exceptional cleverness
prefer the wit, wisdom, and earnestness of the more cultivated
members of the other sex to the too frequent ignorance and triviality
of their own. Undoubtedly, in most societies, women of unusual genius
and accomplishments can more easily find congenial companionship with
men than with women. But to infer from this any natural
incompatibility for friendships between women is to draw a monstrous
inference, wholly unwarranted by the premises. In the sensible
chapter of "A Woman's Thoughts about Women," which Miss Muloch
devotes to this subject, she says, "The friendships of women are much
more common than those of men; but rarely or never so firm, so just,
or so enduring." But then she proceeds, justly, though with a little
inconsistency, to say, "With women these relations may be
sentimental, foolish, and fickle; but they are honest, free from
secondary motives of interest, and infinitely more respectable than
the time-serving, place-hunting, dinner-seeking devotion which
Messrs. Tape and Tadpole choose to denominate friendship." That the
sharper and sincerer feelings of women make them more capable than
men of sacrificing their interests to their passions, less likely to
sacrifice their passions to their interests, and that they are more
absorbed by their sympathies and antipathies, admits of no question.

Eugénie de Guérin, a woman of the rarest heart and soul, wrote in her
journal, a few years ago, this passage, which has already grown
famous: "I have ever sought a friendship so strong and earnest that
only death could break it; a happiness and unhappiness which I had,
alas! in my brother Maurice. No woman has been, or will be, able to
replace him; not even the most distinguished has been able to give me
that bond of intelligence and of tastes, that broad, simple, and
lasting relation. There is nothing fixed, enduring, vital, in the
feelings of women; their attachments to each other are so many pretty
bows of ribbons. I notice these light affections in all female
friends. Can we not, then, love each other differently? I neither
know an example in history nor am acquainted with one in the present.
Orestes and Pylades have no sisters. It makes me impatient, when I
think of it, that you men have something in your hearts which is
wanting to us. In return we have devotedness." It is striking to
notice the identity of sentiment here with that in the maxim of La
Bruyere: "In love women exceed the generality of men, but in
friendship we have infinitely the advantage."

With reference to the statement that "Orestes and Pylades have no
sisters," besides the superfluous disproofs of it contained in the
pages that follow, it is an interesting fact that classic literature
affords one example, which modern writers have never, to my
knowledge, noticed. Pausanias, in his "Description of Greece," tenth
book, twenty-ninth chapter, gives an recount of an elaborate painting
by Polygnotus of the underworld, the scenery and fate of the dead in
the future state. Among the images of the departed set forth on the
canvas were two women, Chloris and rhyia, locked in a fond embrace.
Of these two women, thus shown eternally united in the realm beyond
he grave, Pausanias says that they were a pair of friends
extraordinarily attached to each other in life. Their story is lost.
The imagination of womankind might compensate for the missing
narrative, and make the names of Chloris and Thyia live with the
lames of Damon and Pythias.

Let us sift the grounds of the opinion that women ire relatively
incapable of friendship, analyze the appearances on which it rests,
and separate the truth in it from the error.

The first fact of the subject is, that women are naturally less
selfish and more sympathetic than men.

They have more affection to bestow, greater need of sympathy, and
therefore are more sure, in the absence of love, to seek friendship.
The devastating egotism of man is properly foreign to woman; though
there are many women as haughty, hard, and imperious as any man. But
these are unfeminine, despite their sex. There are women who seem
cold and beautiful stones, their hearts icicles, their tears frozen
gems pressed out by injured pride. On the other hand, there are men
as soft, as modest, as celestially sympathetic, as almost any woman.
Still, the cardinal contrast holds, that women are self-forgetful,
men self-asserting; women hide their surplus affection under a
feigned indifference; men hide their indifference under a feigned
affection. Of course, in this comparison, depraved women are
excluded: these are generally far more heartless and calculating than
men. The aphorism of Rochefoucauld "In their first passion, women
love the lover; in their subsequent ones, they love love" is
descriptive, not of women, but of that class of women who cherish a
succession of lovers, a class familiar to the base and brilliant
French aphorist. With such, the venal commonness of affection first
profanes, then destroys it.

It is a pathetic sign of the diviner nature of women, that they
conceal sorrow more easily than joy, while men conceal joy more
easily than sorrow. The lover of Adelaide de Comminge having joined a
convent of Trappists, she followed him thither, disguised as a man,
took the vows, and was not recognized by him until on her death-bed.
Man is not capable of such pure devotion: only a woman could thus
forbear, and be content with the secret joy of the beloved presence.
Man demands action: woman demands emotion. Friendship between two
youths is martial, adventurous, a trumpet-blast or a bugle-air:
friendship between two girls is poetic, contemplative, the sigh of a
harp-string or the swell of an organ-pipe.

Woman needs friendship more than man, because she is less self-
sufficing. She is much more apt than he to think the form in the
mirror is lovely, but not to think it of herself. Milton's Eve was
startled with a shy delight at the fair shape in the fountain, never
dreaming that it was herself. Men are flutes: they must be filled
with the warm breath of a foreign sympathy. Women are harpsichords:
they have all the conditions of music in themselves, and only need to
be struck. But, containing so much, their need of being struck is the
greater. Charlotte Bronte, in her sad, weary life, full, as she
expressed it, of loneliness, of longing for companionship, had two
faithful and precious friends; her "dear, dear E.," and her "good,
kind Miss W." To the former she writes, "I am at this moment
trembling all over with excitement, after reading your note: it is
what I never received before, the unrestrained pouring out of a warm,
gentle, generous heart. If you love me, do, do, do come on Friday. I
shall watch and wait for you; and, if you disappoint me, I shall
weep." Few sayings are more touching than that which Thackeray heard
a woman utter, that she would gladly have taken Swift's cruelty to
have had his tenderness. Now, is it not true that the intenser need
naturally implies the keener search and the more copious finding?

The great reason why the friendships of women are not more frequent
and prominent than they are is, that the proper destiny of woman
calls her to love; and this sentiment, in its fullness, is usually
too absorbing to leave room and force for conspicuous friendships.
With men the other sentiments are not so much suspended or engulfed
by conjugal and parental love. "The men," La Bruyere says, "are the
occasion that women do not love each other." With the one-sided
exaggeration incident to most aphorisms, this is true. Husband and
children occupy the wife and mother; and marriage is often the grave
of feminine friendships. According to the maxim of Saint Paul, "The
head of the woman is the man:" the attraction of another woman must
generally be weaker. The lives of men are the sighs of nature: the
lives of women are their echoes. The sharp-eyed Richter says, "A
woman, unlike Narcissus, seeks not her own image and a second I: she
much prefers a not-I." This profound remark exactly touches the
difference between friendship and love, and between the respective
relations of man and woman to the two sentiments. Friendship is the
simple reflection of souls by each other. Love is the mutual
reflection of their entire being by two persons, each supplementing
the defects of the other. Love, therefore, is friendship, with a
differential addition. True love includes friendship, as the greater
includes the smaller. Now, the self-sufficient character of man makes
him seek a second I; that is, wish to see himself reflected in
another. But the sympathetic character of woman makes her seek a not-
I; that is, wish to see another reflected in herself. It is incorrect
to say, that woman has less capacity than man for friendship: it is
correct only to say, that man is more easily satisfied with
friendship than woman is. She demands that, and something more; and
every page of history teems with the records of that something more,
the heavenly records of the sufferings, sacrifices, and triumphs of
woman's love. When this imperial sentiment is baffled, and yet the
soul remains mistress of herself, it is impossible that the next
strongest sentiment should not, in all available instances, be
cultivated as a solace and vicegerent. One of the renowned apothegms
of that sinister moralist, Rochefoucauld, is, "Women feel friendship
insipid after love." But he should have limited his remark to vicious
women. It will not apply to virtuous women. Jane Austin, who in
knowledge of the feminine heart has few equals, says, "Friendship is
certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."

Women are more sensitive and acute than men, more delicate
electrometers for all the imponderable agencies of sympathy; and this
greater penetration makes them more fastidious, gives them better
ability indeed to admire what is superior, but causes them to be less
tolerant of what is offensive. The innervation and nutrition of woman
are finer and more complicated than those of man; and, by as much as
her nerves are more numerous and more delicate, she has a keener and
richer consciousness, including many states he is incapable of
reproducing. He is more of a head; she, more of a plant. Her body is
far more intelligent than his; and feelings are the thoughts of the
body, as thoughts are the feelings of the mind. No one can forget the
lines, made so famous by their exquisite felicity, written of
Elizabeth Drury by Donne:

The pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
Ye might have almost said her body thought.

Mothers feel as if still connected with their offspring by the fibres
that joined them in their prenatal life; as the nerves continue to
report in consciousness an amputated hand or foot. There is in all
their emotions a vascular quality or consanguineous tincture never to
be wholly eliminated.

The greater material identification of mothers than of fathers with
their children, in the long period of gestation and nursing, leads to
a closer and more persistent mental identification with them. The
physical differences of the sexes react on the mind to make moral
differences; and these are further heightened by differences in their
education, habits of life, and sphere of interests. No doubt, these
differences occupy a larger share of attention in women than in men.

Those who have suffered sharply, see keenly; and it is difficult to
conceal much from women. They have the strangest facility in reading
physiological language, tones, gestures, bearing, and all those
countless signs which make the face and eyes such tell-tales of the
soul. They will look into your eyes, and see you think; listen to
your voice, and hear you feel. The coy and subtle world of emotion
now infinitely timid and reticent, now all gates flung down for the
floods to pour is their domain. They are at home in it all, from the
rosy fogs of feeling to the twilight borders of intelligence. On the
one side, these endowments are a help to friendship. The ardor with
which a pure and generous woman enters into choice states of soul in
another is a redemptive sight. This capacity of swift perception and
sympathy makes the friendship of a woman a precious boon to a man who
aims at greatness or perfection; and scarcely ever has there been an
illustrious man who has not been appreciated, comforted, and inspired
in secret by some woman long before he became famous, circling around
him with her unselfish ministrations, like that star which is the
invisible companion of Sirius.

The poor young Niebuhr writes home from Great Britain to Madam
Hensler, the wife of the good professor who had befriended him in
college, "Your letter has made me so wild with delight, that I have
felt full of affection to every creature that has come in my way."
The melancholy heart and dismal lot of Gerald Griffin, the Irish
novelist, found almost their solitary human alleviation and
brightness in the sustaining kindness and admiration of a lady,
designated in his brother's biography of him as Mrs. L. John Foster,
whose social career was as trying to him as his massive soul was
lonely, exceedingly enjoyed the cordial encouragement and affection
of a number of cultivated and excellent women. Many of his published
letters were addressed to one of these, Mrs. Mant. He thus writes to
her of another one: "I turn, disgusted and contemptuous, from insipid
and shallow folly, to lave in the tide of deeper sentiments. There I
swim and dive and rise and gambol, with all that wild delight which
could be felt by a fish, after panting out of its element awhile,
when flung into its own world of waters by some friendly hand. Such a
hand to me is Mrs. C.'s. It is impossible to give a just idea of the
strange fascination she diffuses around her. My mind seems to be
larger, stronger, and more brilliant in her company than anywhere
else. Every fountain of sentiment opens at her approach."

The greater sensibility, insight, and impulsiveness of women, on the
other hand, expose them more to obstacles in the way of friendship.
Coldness and meanness are less endurable by them. A genuinely feeling
soul has an insuperable repugnance alike for unfeelingness, for false
feeling, and for false expressions of feeling. An Arabian courser
cannot travel comfortably with a snail. A soul whose motions are
musical curves cannot well blend with a soul whose motions are
discordant angles. A woman is naturally as much more capricious than
a man, as she is more susceptible. A slighter shock suffices to
jostle her delicate emotions out of delight into disgust. She is
therefore a severer personal critic. Male peccadilloes are female
crimes. A wet-blanket presence that she could not tolerate may
refresh him. As less strong, less stably poised, than he, she is more
tempted to have recourse to artifice; and when she does stoop to
dissimulation, she uses it with inimitable dexterity, as shield, as
foil, as poniard. It would be a difficult task for men to do what the
spotless and loving Eugénie de Guérin was horrified at seeing two
prominent Parisian ladies do, play the part of tender friends in
society, and then turn away and venomously caricature each other.
What woman who possessed a ring conferring invisibility on its
wearer, would dare to put it on, and move about among her friends?
The weakness of women is an exaggerated attention to trifles. The
great condition of steady friendship is community of plans and ends
in the parties. This is much wanting in women, who think chiefly of
persons, little of laborious aims. Two girls, who live in a multitude
of evaporating impulses and dreams it were as easy to yoke a couple
of humming-birds, and make them draw. Because the polarity of a grand
fixed purpose is absent from it, the mind of many a woman is a heap
of petty antipathies; and, where the likings are fickle, the
dislikings are pretty sure to be tenacious. A keen student of human
nature has remarked, that many women "spend force enough in trivial
observations on dress and manners, to form a javelin to pierce quite
through a character." Women's eyes are armed with microscopes to see
all the little defects and dissimilarities which can irritate and
injure their friendships. Hence there are so many feminine friends
easily provoked to mutual criticisms and recriminations.

The dear friends, Fanny Squeers and Matilda Price, experienced a
violent jealousy on account of Nicholas Nickleby. After a fierce
altercation, they fell into tears, followed by remonstrances and an
explanation, and terminated by embraces and by vows of eternal
friendship; "the occasion making the fifty-second time of repeating
the same impressive ceremony within a twelvemonth." But obviously it
is a closer approach to the truth to take the sensitiveness and
interruptions in the mutual relations of women, as compared with
those in the relations of men, as the direct, rather than as the
inverse, measure of the number and value of their respective
friendships. Yet, by a gross error, the estimate is usually made in
the latter way.

The maxim of Walter Savage Landor is a palpable stroke at the truth:
"No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for
girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman."
In fact, there is immensely less indifference between women than
between men; there are incomparably more enmities; and there are a
great many more friendships. It is the enormous preponderance of the
mutual dislikes of women over those of men, which chiefly has given
rise to the fallacious belief that their mutual likes are less.
These, too, are more, though not, perhaps, so much more.

Among women, it is true, only a few of those memorable unions of soul
and life are known which entitle the parties to be ranked as pairs of
friends. Our ignorance, however, of such cases does not prove their
non-existence. There have been thousands of them. There are a great
many at this moment. It is the characteristic modesty and privacy of
the lives of women which keep these heart-histories concealed. The
most gifted, refined, and elevated natures are most likely to have
this experience; and such natures shrink with unconquerable
repugnance from all obtrusion, or betrayal, of their inmost
experiences. The lives of noble women are "so transparent and so deep
that only the subtle insight of sympathy can penetrate them:" their
open secrets baffle all the scrutiny of coarse souls. The choicest of
her sex will, to some extent, agree with the energetic sentiment of
Eugénie de Guérin "I detest those women who mount the pulpit, and lay
their passions bare." Engrossing, then, as the attachment of two
women may be, it is not often thrust into public view so as to obtain
the literary recognition won by the similar attachments of men who
act their parts in the front of society, seeking a place in history
for their achievements. As far as the public are concerned, women
merge their heart-lives in the careers of those dear to them. It is
accordingly in exceptional cases alone that a knowledge of the
friendships of women is preserved for posterity. This, indeed, holds
likewise of men, but in a much lower degree. Thus far there have been
printed accounts of the lives of hundreds of men where there has been
a printed account of the life of one woman. Allowance should be made
for this in our estimate of their comparative friendships.

And now has not something been said to shake the current opinion,
that the friendships of women are few and superficial? It is true
that women are more imperiously called to love than men are; are more
likely to be absorbed by this master-passion, and thus are more
exposed to jealousy of each other. It is true, that, owing to their
greater sensitiveness, keener subjection to the fastidious sway of
taste, women are more apt than men to fall out, being more easily
disturbed and estranged by trifles; but this relative subjection to
trifles is chiefly a consequence of the exclusion of woman hitherto
from the grandest fields of education, the noblest subjects of
interest and action. It is true, that the attachments of women, on
account of the greater privacy of their lives, are less conspicuous
than those of men, less frequently obtain historic or literary
mention, and therefore seem to be rarer. But it is not true, either
that women are incapable of enthusiastic and steadfast friendships
for each other, or that such friendships are uncommon. If women are
more critical and severe towards their own sex than men are, it is
chiefly because they cannot, like men, be indifferent to each other:
they must positively feel either sympathy or aversion.

It is very frequently the case, that a single woman, blessed with
wealth, invites some friend, to whom she is strongly attached, to
accept a home with her; and they live thenceforth in indissoluble
union. Such an instance among men is almost as rare as a white
blackbird. Unmarried sisters so often pass all their years together,
inseparably united, both inwardly and outwardly, that almost every
one of us is acquainted with many examples. But it is extremely rare
for bachelor brothers to club together, and pass a wholly shared
existence.

In the higher classes of society, it is a common custom for nobly-
born women to have lady companions, to whom they give a home and
support and constant love, for the sake of congenial intercourse with
them, for the comfort of their presence and conversation. There is
scarcely a corresponding custom among men. It has happened to the
writer to know numerous instances in which a wealthy woman has, in
her lifetime, freely bestowed on a poor friend, from a pure impulse
of good-will, a sum of money sufficient to secure her a handsome
independence. This substantial deed of friendship he has not known
paralleled in a single instance among men.

Men do not often go so far in either moral extreme as the other sex.
It is the corruption of the best that makes the worst. Who is this,
shameless mixture of beast and fiend, with body of fire, heart of
marble, brow of bronze, and hand hollowed to hold money? It is the
woman who sells herself in the street. And who is this, with upturned
eyes of fathomless love, the radiant paleness of ecstasy transfusing
her countenance, heaven flooding her soul, the world a forgotten toy
beneath her feet? It is the woman who, in silence and secrecy, gives
herself to God. So capacious of extremes is the feminine spirit.

There is no fretfullness, spitefullness, revengefullness, equal to
those of a woman. There is no grace, sweetness, dignity,
disinterestedness, equal to those of a woman. And, when all is said,
the conclusion of one who understands the subject will be, that, for
quick depth of sympathy, intuitive divination, joyous sacrifice,
perfect reproduction of all the modulations of feeling, there is no
friendship equal to that of a woman.

FRIENDSHIP WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE TIES OF CONSANGUINITY.

THE presentation of the friendships of women in distinct classes will
add clearness to the treatment, and will also make it easier to
suggest, with some approach to adequacy, the wealth of the topic. It
is natural to begin with instances within the limits of blood
relationship, and between persons of opposite sex. The relations of
conscious affection among those of near kindred are but too apt, from
the blunting influence of custom, to have a character of tameness,
lukewarm routine. The members of the family, in their commonplace
familiarity, cherish a quiet goodwill and fidelity, without any
relishing surprise, romantic hues, or mystery. Calmly affectionate,
or perhaps listless, towards all within the domestic circle, they
look outside for inspiring intercourse and thrilling attachments, and
for calls to lofty sacrifice and delight. This is too often the case.
Identity of inheritance and situation, sameness of idiosyncrasy, and
habitude of union, squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe
in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in
numerous instances it is not so. The confidential intimacies, the
incessant dependencies, duties, and favors of near relatives, instead
of engendering a consciousness of vapid usage, sprinkle electric
stimulants on their mutual feelings and intercommunications.

Their affictions towards each other keep fresh and grow deeper, and
the homestead stands in a landscape tinged with faith and romance.
The imagination, undeadened by custom, goes with their eyes and
hands, exerts its beautifying magic, and idealizes or glorifies their
images in each other's souls.

Then kinship becomes friendship. Upon the material consanguinity is
superinduced a spiritual consanguinity; the legal and customary bonds
of descent, association, and duty are brightened and exalted into
delightful relations of intelligence and sympathy, a choice community
of character, purposes, and experience. The relative is then hidden
in the friend. Innumerable aunts and nephews, nieces and uncles,
cousins, and other branches of kindred, have found in their
relationship, with the common interests and the consequent meetings,
a fortunate occasion for forming close and blessed friendships.

The biblical instance of Esther and Mordecai is very charming.
Esther, left an orphan, was adopted and brought up by her uncle,
Mordeoi. When the beautiful Jewish maiden was taken into the palace,
among those from whom Ahasuerus was to choose his queen, "Mordecai
walked every day before the court of the women's house, to know how
Esther did and what should become of her." And when she had been made
queen, "she did still the commandment of Mordecai, like as when she
was brought up with him." In the threatened calamity of the Jews,
Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and wept.
Esther's maids told her of it. "Then was the queen exceedingly
grieved; and she sent raiment to clothe Mordecai." In all the sequel
of the well-known tale, it is easy to see that the niece's friendship
for her uncle was at least as important a sentiment as the wife's
love for her husband. Beranger caused to be placed on the tomb of his
aunt this touching inscription: She was never a mother, yet sons
mourned for her. It is a striking fact that the strength of the tie
of blood is in an historic process of decrease, while, parallel with
it, the strength of the tie of moral sympathy is in an historic
process of increase. In primitive ages, when barbaric force
prevailed, and life was full of exposures, and redress was uncertain,
the family was the unit of society. All within the bond of the family
stood compactly together in the most sacred and intense of leagues
against every hostile approach from without. But as law and order
became consolidated, and their sanctions diffused, and adequate
general tribunals were set up, and public considerations encroached
on private, the tie of physical kindred grew less, that of moral
fellowship more. The bloody feuds of old times, which ran down the
veins of successive generations like streams of fire, have become
nearly obsolete. The hates transmitted with such wild ferocity, the
friendships handed down with such burning loyalty, among the ancient
Scottish clans, are phenomena not possible in the cultured circles of
Berlin, London, Paris, or New York. This relative decay of the energy
of the sentiment of material relationship is not to be regretted; for
it is a sign of progress, when we see its connection with the
corresponding development of the force of free spiritual affinity. It
looks towards the end contemplated by Jesus when he said. "Whosoever
doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my mother, and my
brother, and my sister."

Once the merit or demerit of the individual had comparatively little
to do with the regards which the other members of the family
cherished towards him. Now it goes far towards a total determination
of those regards. Multitudes of the nearest relatives are utterly
indifferent to each other; multitudes of them hate each other. Where
no fitness for a genuine union of mind and heart exists in the
parties, all the forensic ties and all the conjoining memories in the
world go for nothing. A horrid illustration of this truth is given by
the conduct of Tullia, the Lady Macbeth of antiquity, who drove her
chariot over the body of her murdered father lying in the "Wicked
Street," and smiled as his blood spattered her dress. But truly it is
a happy thing when those naturally associated in birth, position, and
circumstances of life, become by sympathy inwardly united in mutual
appreciation and will. It is like adding the spirit of music to the
material conditions of music.

FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN.

PARENTS and children furnish the first class of examples in which the
fondness of a close attachment by nature is elevated into a freer and
more comprehensive connection by intelligent sympathy; in which the
affection of instinct and custom is transformed into the loftier and
richer affection of friendship. This high and benign transformation
takes place in due season between all mothers and sons, all daughters
and fathers, who afford the requisite conditions for it; that is, in
all cases where they remain long enough together, and their
characters and manners are such as naturally command respect and love
from each other. Even when children are ignoble and unworthy, their
fathers and mothers may yearn over them with every strictly parental
affection; and even when parents are vicious and degraded, their
children may regard them with every strictly filial affection; but
friendship between them is generally impossible without the
co-existence, on both sides, of intrinsic worth, of those responsive
virtues which elicit esteem and dominate sympathy. The great reason
of the failure of a broad, glowing friendship between parents and
children a failure o deplorably common in our homes is the lack, in
heir characters, of that wealth, nobleness, sweetness, patience,
aspiration, which would irresistibly draw them to each other in
mutual honor, love, and joy. The only remedy for this unhappy failure
is the cure of its unhappier cause. Whatever makes characters deep,
rich, pure, and gentle in themselves, tends to make them pleasing to
each other.

It is absurd to suppose, that mean, hateful, and miserable souls will
love each other simply because they are connected by ties of
consanguinity, of interest, or of duty.

Whatever makes us suffer, especially whatever injures our finer
emotions, naturally tends to become repulsive to us, an object of
dislike gathering disagreeable associations. Even a mother, a son, a
father, a daughter, may become such an object, as is illustrated with
melancholy frequency. But when parents and children possess those
high qualities of soul which naturally give pleasure, create
affection, and evoke homage; and when they are not too early
separated, or too much distracted in alien pursuits, a firm and
ardent friendship must spring up between them. The mere parental and
filial relation will become subordinated, as a sober central thread
in a wide web of colored embroidery. The parental instinct and the
filial instinct, weaned from their organic directness, will grow more
complex and mental; and, parallel with this process, the gracious
guardians and the clinging dependants will gradually change into
companions and friends, still retaining, however, sacred vestiges and
memories of the original cords of their union. When we have allowed
proper abatement for the thousands of instances in which this
precious result is not reached, the general statement now made opens
to us a large class of beautiful friendships. In all ages there have
been myriads of mothers and sons, myriads of daughters and fathers,
who were models of devoted, happy friends. Before paying attention to
these, it will be profitable for us to notice the other cases.

Considered with reference to our subject, there are four classes of
parents and children. First, Those who are positive enemies, their
main relation being one of opposition, dislike, and pain. Undoubtedly
a chief reason for this unfortunate result is carelessness, failure
to understand and feel in advance the inestimable importance of a
right rule and fruition of the home. But a cause working more
strongly still arises from prominent vices of character, base and
wicked qualities of soul, which make harmony impossible, friction and
alienation inevitable. Disorder, fretfullness, antagonism, and
misery, pervading the house, compel its members to detest each other.
Then hatred occupies the place which should be occupied by
friendship. This is a melancholy and odious sight to see. It is a
horrible evil for its sufferers to endure. It is a terrible
misfortune and wretchedness to all concerned.

Secondly, There are parents and children who live in entire unconcern
and neglect of each other, in a mere routine of external connections
and associations. This absence of all deep personal sensibility,
either sympathetic or hostile, is not so frightful a calamity as the
rankling resentment of a rooted and conscious enmity; but it is a
lamentable misfortune. It is a sad loss, however little they may
think of it. Absorbed in other matters, giving all their affection to
business, fashion, ambition, dissipation, or to persons outside of
the home-circle, they overlook the thing most indispensable for
placid and permanent contentment; and are sure, sooner or later, to
rue their folly, in an experience of bitter disappointment.

Thirdly, there are those who, so far from cherishing hatred or
indifference, deeply love each other, and passionately long to enjoy
an intimate union in reciprocal confidence, esteem, and sympathy, but
are prevented by some unhappy impediment, some disastrous
misunderstanding or morbid pique. Many a parent yearns with
unspeakable fondness towards a disobedient and ungrateful child; the
heart breaking with agony for the reconciliation, the embrace, the
sweet communion fate withholds. Many a child profoundly desires to
fall at the feet of a cold, hard, careless parent, and with
supplicating tears win the notice, the affection, that would be so
priceless; and, sadder still, there is many an instance where both
parent and child are truly noble and affectionate, and would give the
world if they could break through the separating barrier, and lavish
their whole hearts on each other; but, in spite of these generous
qualities, their common desires and their bitter suffering, some
falsehood, some pride, some shyness, some suspicion, some chill,
intangible phantom, is set fatally between them. In every community
there are piteous tragedies of this sort, little dreamed of by those
outside, but which the bleeding hearts concerned in them feel as a
deadly drain, hastening them towards the grave.

Fourthly, Besides the parents and children who are open enemies, who
are utter indifferentists, or who, while loving each other, are kept
apart by some obstacle, there is another class, who, as free and
cordial friends, happily realize in their relation all that is to be
desired. In these examples there are ample wisdom, considerateness,
tender sympathy, and guardian strength, on the one side; ready
docility, attentiveness, obedience, reverence, and fondness, on the
other; with an exuberance of indescribable comfort and peace on both
sides. What a treasure, what an inestimable boon, what a divine
trust, what an inexhaustible delight, is such an affection between a
parent and a child! What a paradise any country would be, if such an
experience were welling up, a pure fountain of life, in every home
throughout its borders!

Few inquiries can have greater interest or importance than the
inquiry, why there is not more generally between parents and children
that warm, ingenuous, abiding affection which produces a full and
joyous friendship. A clear perception and statement of the
difficulties in the way of it may suggest the means of removing them.
And, in the outset, is it not obvious that the home affections
flourish so scantily because scanty attention is paid to the
cultivation of them? It is forever the fallacy and folly of man to
think least of that which lies nearest to him, and is the most
indissolubly bound up with his being as a cause of happiness or of
misery. He thinks most eagerly on those comparatively exceptional and
remote things, which, in consequence of their greatness or their
rarity, are the strangest and the most impressive to him. He ought to
pay the keenest heed to that which is the most important in its
influence on his life, not to that which is the most startling to his
fancy. Now, it is unquestionably true, that while there is nothing
which contributes so much to enrich or to impoverish us, to bless or
to curse us, as our domestic relations, there is scarcely any thing
which we take less pains to cultivate into all that it is capable of
becoming. In most instances, the life of the home is so close to us,
so identified with ourselves, accepted with such a matter of course
security, that we overlook the delicate conditions for preserving its
freshness and securing its increase. But, in every relation of
persons, there are two sets of conditions, corresponding with the two
sides, neither of which can be neglected with impunity. There are a
multitude of homes which are centres of irritation and wretchedness,
miniature hells to their occupants.

The first thing to be done is to turn thought to the subject, break
up the apathy of routine, secure an earnest appreciation of the facts
in the case, and then study the remedy.

One great obstacle to the desired friendships of parents and children
consists in the difficulty of a perfect sympathy between persons
marked by such differences of age, position, interest, and
experience. Those of the same years, passions, pleasures, duties,
will naturally sympathize the most easily. But in all these respects
the disparities of parent and child are equally numerous and
striking.

They look at things from opposed points of view; they judge of
subjects in the light respectively of experience and of inexperience.
This great and constant contrast must give rise to innumerable
discrepancies of opinion and of desire, provocative of disagreements,
if not of dislikes. Nature has, however, provided powerful
neutralizers for this obstacle to sympathy between those who are so
widely unlike, counteractives which forcibly tend to prevent
disagreements from breeding hostilities. These counteractives are the
profound instincts of parental fondness and filial reverence, the
first of which tends to make the parents enter into the spiritual
states of their children, and to look at things from their point of
view; and the second, to make the children, with docile duteousness,
adopt as their own the conclusions of their parents. These
counteractives ought to be carefully fostered, neither party
forgetting the differences between himself and the other, but
endeavoring to bridge those differences by the identifying powers of
imagination and sympathy. Another frequent destroyer or lessener of
the natural love of parents and children is the conflict between the
rightful authority of the former and the wilful impulses of the
latter.

Maturity, having accumulated knowledge and wisdom out of long
experience, and being set by God and nature in charge over the
headstrong instincts of ignorant or capricious youth, cannot avoid
the duty of frequently applying the curb to excessive desires, and
the spur to defective ones. A sense of chafing, an impulse to resent
and rebel, will naturally often arise. And, in every such collision
of passion and rule, there is a tendency to hostility. It is needless
to say how lamentably frequent are the examples in which this
tendency makes actual foes of those between whom the natural bonds of
love and reverence are of the most sacred character. It is evident
that parental authority is a divine trust which must be exercised
over childhood and youth. Only it should be exercised on principle,
not from caprice; for the good of the ruled, not for the
gratification of a despotic self-assertion in the ruler; with fond
gentleness, not with harshness or cruelty. And the authority of the
parent should be vindicated as far as possible by force of wisdom,
weight of character, power of persuasion; avoiding, as far as can
properly be done, every occasion of conflict, every need of a violent
issue. The child, on the other hand, ought to remember the rightful
authority of his parents, consider their greater experience, take for
granted their benignant intention, cultivate a grateful sense of
dependence and duty towards them, and foster the habit of prompt and
hearty submission to their wishes. It is a safe rule, in general, for
a boy or girl to respect and obey the father and mother, and not to
think, when they oppose the thoughtless spirit of self-indulgence,
that this parental opposition is unreasonable or unkind. To honor
one's parents is the first scriptural commandment with promise.

It is a habit which no one will ever regret. But, alas! how many a
man, how many a woman, has kneeled on the grave where father or
mother lay mouldering, and has lamented, with burning tears of shame
and sorrow, the disobedience, the disrespect, the unkindness, the
neglect, shown in earlier years! How have they longed to lift up the
faded forms from their coffins, to re-animate them, and to have them
again in their homes, that, by unwearied ministrations of tenderness,
they might atone for the upbraiding past! Let the man in the full
maturity of his age, hardened by long contact with the world, revisit
the scenes of his childhood. Let him stand by the old homestead where
fence and wall have fallen, and house and hearth gone to dust. What
presence hallows the place? Who so fills the air about him as to seem
just ready to break into palpable vision wherever he turns? It is his
mother. Overwhelmed by a flood of memories, inspired by an immortal
faith, not less than by an immortal affection, he drops on his knees,
and cries,

Mother! thou art mother still;
Only the body dies;
Such love as bound thy heart to mine,
Death only purifies.

The same moral is drawn by Sarah Tytler in her excellent book of
"Sweet Counsel" for girls, where she says, "I do not know that I ever
told my father I was once or twice very angry with him for refusing
me this or that request. My lips will never tell him now, and beg his
pardon, and assure him that I was not worthy of him then, but that I
know all at last; my hand will never clasp his hand, my lips never
kiss his lips again. But I do not break my heart; for I think he
knows all that I ever intended to tell him, and has forgiven me long
ago. I am persuaded,

"There must be wisdom with great death;
The dead shall look me through and through."

But perhaps the most fatal influence against the growth and
perpetuation of vivid friendships between parents and children is the
disenchanting effect of familiarity. A close and constant
intercourse, long continued, usually tends to make persons arid,
commonplace, uninteresting, to each other, takes away surprise, eager
expectation, and romance. There is nothing human beings so much like
as to be able strongly to impress and be impressed. This seems to
cease to be possible in a company who fancy they have struck every
string, sounded every secret, exhausted the possibilities, in each
other. A long subjection of the same persons to the same
circumstances produces a general spirit of sameness, a flagging
tedium, a want of varied attraction and stimulation. Let a stranger,
a foreign friend, any honored guest, come in, and how his presence
quickens every thing! Life shines with novel lustre, and throbs with
new energy. Every one puts his best foot forward, exerts his best
powers to interest. The fresh pleasure every one feels gives him a
fresh power of pleasing. But, ah it would be of no use, we think, to
make any effort in the dull old circle of our familiars, who can
produce no effect on us, and on whom we, in turn, can produce no
effect. And thus life in the home becomes monotonous, torpid, and
vacant. Worlds of love are every day destroyed by indifference and
repulse. If the same pains were taken to invigorate and perpetuate
the domestic affections as to secure the good-will of other persons
whom we admire or depend on, it could scarcely fail to give a
wonderful enrichment to the satisfactions of home.

This truth is especially applicable to the relation of parents and
children in our day. The old extreme of a severe exercise of parental
authority has passed away, and a new extreme of filial
insubordination and insolent self-assertion has taken its place. It
is altogether too frequent a thing now to see lads and lasses taking
their parents to task as inferiors, and demanding every service from
them. The thought of his child should be a constant delight to a
parent. When the ill-temper and ill-behavior of a child cause every
association with him in the heart of the parent to be disturbing and
painful, how can the result be otherwise than alienating and
depressing? Let there be two children in a family, one of whom is
invariably obedient, gentle, attentive, ingenuous; the other,
irritable, insubordinate, careless, secretive, and untruthful. The
former shall be idolized, while the latter is regarded with
condemnatory repugnance. The fact that a boy is your son, or that a
girl is your daughter, cannot wholly neutralize the repulsiveness of
their odious traits. When children uniformly respect and obey their
parents, and seek by every kind attention and praiseworthy effort to
please them, it is not in human nature that they should fail to be
unspeakably loved and caressed. Deferential treatment, patient
service, quick sympathy, expectant attention, an obvious desire to
please, are the most potent charms that mortals can wield. They show
that the parties are important to each other. They give life its
highest value. In their absence, all romantic color fades, and every
precious affection expires. The most effective intercourse that
vanity can establish with strangers offers nothing comparable to the
delicious quality of the experience which results when a parent and
child, of suitable character and age, are blessed with a complete
friendship. Every thought of it pours for them a sudden sunshine
through the sky, an exhilarating fragrance through the air.

Undoubtedly the affections are greatly hurt and repressed by being
regarded as obligations rather than as privileges. They must be wooed
forth by the gentlest lures. They will not come when carelessly
expected and demanded as a matter of course. The heart will be free.
It imperiously resents bonds and orders. The love of parent and child
is certainly even more a delight than it is a duty. They should be
friends, not so much because they are commanded to be such, but more
because they are mutually worthy, and because their peace of mind,
their contentment of heart, their improvement and happiness, depend
on their being such. What privilege can be imagined superior in
purity of joy and profit, to that of a young man who has for his
friend a wise and holy mother, whom he loves with enthusiasm and
confides in with an absolute devotion?

And if there be a human tear
From passion's dross refined and clear,
A tear so limpid and so meek
It would not stain an angel's cheek,
'Tis that which pious fathers shed
Upon a duteous daughter's head.

FRIENDSHIPS OF MOTHERS AND SONS.

CORNELIA, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and wife of Tiberius
Gracchus, was left a widow, with a large family of young children.
She refused all subsequent offers of marriage, even when Ptolemy of
Egypt wished to share his throne with her. Her two sons, Tiberius and
Caius, the tribunes who achieved such greatness and fame, owed every
thing to her judicious training, to her wise and unwearied pains in
educating them, guarding them, and inspiring them to high deeds. She
was almost idolized by the Roman people, and occupied, indeed, the
proudest position of any woman in the history of her country. Her two
sons venerated, and invariably took counsel with their mother.

It is evident that their inner lives were shared with her. One of
them was known to have dropped, at her request, a law which he meant
to urge through the Senate. Cicero says that Catulus pronounced a
public panegyric on his mother, Popilia, the first time such a thing
was done in Rome. In a less formal manner, Caius Gracchus often
publicly spoke the praises of his mother, Cornelia. When her sons
were murdered, she bore the cruel affliction with imposing
magnanimity. Departing from Rome, she took up her abode at Misenum,
where, in the exercise of a queenly hospitality, she lived,
surrounded by illustrious men of letters, as well as by others of the
highest rank and distinction. Universally honored and respected, she
reached a good old age, and finally received at the hands of the
Roman people a statue inscribed, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi.
Notwithstanding her somewhat meddlesome and despotic temper, Queen
Olympias seems to have maintained an intimate friendship with her
son, Alexander the Great. He omitted no occasion, we are told, of
showing his esteem and affection for her. When absent on his
campaigns, he kept up a constant correspondence with her, highly
valuing her letters, and in return concealing nothing from her. Saint
Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, a sublime example of this
friendship, sit on the shore of fame, side by side; the face of the
mother a little above that of the son; both of them worn with care,
full of lofty pathos and love, looking at us out of the night of
time; the sea of mortal passion far beneath their feet; the eternal
stars hanging silent above, even as Ary Scheffer reveals in his
solemn picture of them sitting in the window at Ostia, and gazing
together over the ocean.

Thirty years after the death of Monica, Augustine said in one of his
sermons, "Ah! The dead do not come back; for, had it been possible,
there is not a night when I should not have seen my mother, she who
could not live apart from me, and who, in all my wanderings, never
forsook me. For God forbid that in heaven her affection should cease,
or that she should not, if she could, have come to console me when I
suffered! She who loved me more than words can express." The example,
in American history, of a valued and fruitful friendship between a
mother and a son, given by Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams, is
stamped with prominence by the exceptional fact of the publication of
her letters to him. These letters breathe wisdom and virtue, with
incitement to all worthy aims, no less than strong mental
companionship and fervent maternal sympathy. They have been edited by
her grandson, who pays her a deserved tribute in the memoir he has
prefixed. The wife of the elder President Adams can never lose the
exalted place she holds, in the honoring remembrance of the American
people, among those exemplary women whose powerful talents and
virtues did so much to mould the destinies of the nascent Republic.
Madame Goethe said to Bettine, "My Wolfgang and I were so nearly of
an age, that we grew up together more as playmates than as mother and
child." And, when the great Wolfgang was an old man, he said that his
mother, as yet quite a child, grew up to consciousness first with,
then in, himself and his sister Cornelia. Her intercourse with him is
prominent through a large part of his life: her influence on him is
visible through the whole of it. The union of the illustrious
brothers Humboldt with their mother was especially full and tender.
While she lived, they shared souls; and, after her departure, the
sons idolized her memory. Long years had passed, when William,
expiring in the arms of his elder brother, said, "I shall soon be
with our mother." And Alexander said, "I did not think my old eyes
had so many tears." The relation of Guizot, the distinguished French
statesman and author, with his mother, was one of the deepest,
fullest, and noblest friendships that ever conjoined mother and son.
Madame Guizot went through the horror and tragedy of the Revolution,
to which her husband was one of the choicest victims, with a heroism
and a dignity unsurpassed; and devoted herself to her maternal duties
with a calm energy and wisdom whose proper fruits she lived long to
enjoy. Her character revealed the purest feminine qualities in
conspicuous perfection. Her honored old age showed all that is lovely
and all that is august united, in her history, her spirit, her
manners, her acquirements, and her presence, to attract confidence
and to command respect. Indissolubly joined, through more than sixty
years, with her brilliant and high-souled son, she was not more proud
and fond of him than he was of her.

FRIENDSHIPS OF DAUGHTERS AND FATHERS.

CICERO and his daughter, Tullia, enjoyed an extraordinary friendship.
From all the hints left us, it is to be gathered that Tullia was a
woman of sweet and noble character. It is certain that she was most
affectionately devoted to her father; and that she had
accomplishments of knowledge and taste, qualifying her to be his
companion and his delight in his age and grief. It is affecting to
read how eagerly, on his recall from exile, she hurried to Brundusium
to throw herself into his arms. She died at about thirty-two. He was
thrown into a state of lamentable prostration. Turn where he would in
his inconsolable sorrow, engage in whatever he might, tears
constantly overtook him. His friends, Atticus, Csar, Brutus,
Sulpicius, and others, wrote letters of sympathy to him. He retired
to one of country-seats. Seeking the solace of solitude, he buried
himself every morning in the thickest of the wood, and came not out
till evening. In his former reverses, he says he could turn to one
place for shelter and peace. "A daughter I had, in whose sweet
conversation I could drop all my cares and troubles.

But now every thing is changed." "It is all over with me, Atticus: I
feel it more than ever now that I have lost the only being who still
bound me to life." He purposed to erect on a commanding site, as a
monument to his dear Tullia, a splendid temple, which, as though
dedicated to some god, should survive all the changes of ownership,
and bear to distant futurity the memory of her worth, and of his
sorrow for her. For a long time, he could think of nothing but the
details of this plan, on which he intended to lavish the bulk of his
fortune. He avoided society for almost a year, and never recovered
from the wound which the loss of her gave his heart. Margaret Roper
was the pride and darling of her father, Sir Thomas More, whom in
return she venerated and loved with the whole depth of her heart. The
beauty of their relation cannot be forgotten by those who have read
the life of the great English martyr. It was by her brave duteousness
that his mutilated body was buried in the chancel of Chelsea Church.
His head, exposed upon a pole on London Bridge for fourteen days, was
ordered to be thrown into the Thames; but Margaret rescued it,
preserved it in a leaden box, and directed that, after her death, it
should be placed with her in the grave.

One of the loveliest examples of this class of friendships is
unveiled by William Wirt in the exquisite memoir he wrote of his
daughter, Agnes, after her death at the early age of sixteen. The
example is closely parallel to that of the famous and good John
Evelyn, who, apostrophizing his daughter, Mary, in mournful memory,
says, "Thy affection, duty, and love to me was that of a friend as
well as of a child." So Wirt writes of his Agnes: "To me she was not
only the companion of my studies, but the sweetener of my toils. The
painter, it is said, relieved his aching eyes by looking on a curtain
of green. My mind, in its hour of deepest fatigue, required no other
refreshment than one glance at my beloved child, as she sat beside
me." Not many fathers and daughters have been fonder or faster
friends than Aaron and Theodosia Burr. The character and memory of
Burr, in the popular imagination, have been blackened beyond the hope
of bleaching. Of course, he was a man mixed of good and bad; and was
not such an unmitigated devil as some would paint him. But his
selfishness, sensuality, recklessness, and degradation give, in one
respect, a peculiar interest and instructiveness to the enthusiastic
friendship subsisting between him and his daughter. It is no disproof
of the need of the great virtues to serve as the basis of a true and
enduring friendship. It proves that a sincere love, even in an
unclean and depraved soul, purges it, and adorns it with meritorious
charms and real worth in that relation. However bad Burr may have
been in other relations, to his daughter he was ever good, gentle,
and wise, unwearied in his devotion, and clothed with many
fascinations. Good persons may sometimes be ill-consorted and odious
to each other, their intercourse full of jars and frictions. Bad
persons may sometimes be so related as to show each other only their
good qualities, and be happy friends, while all around are detesting
them. In one of her letters to her father, Theodosia speaks of his
wonderful fortitude, and goes on to say, "Often, after reflecting on
this subject, you appear to me so elevated above all other men; I
contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration,
reverence, love, and pride, that very little superstition would be
necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm
does your character excite in me. When I afterward revert to myself,
how insignificant do my best qualities appear! My vanity would be
greater, if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is in
our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of
such a man." Burr, on the evening before his duel with Hamilton,
wrote to his daughter a long letter, in which he said, "I am indebted
to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the
happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely
satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped, or even
wished." Unhappily he slew his antagonist, and himself survived to
carry a load of deadly and universal obloquy which would have crushed
to the earth almost any other man.

Theodosia set sail from Charleston in a little vessel, which was
never heard of again. It was supposed to have foundered off Cape
Hatteras. The loss of his daughter, Burr said, "severed him from the
human race." Certainly, from that time to the end of his prolonged
and dishonored life, he never was wholly what he had been before. An
inner spring had been broken, and the purest contents of his heart
had escaped through the breach. Parton very fitly dedicates to the
memory of Theodosia his highly readable and charitable life of her
father. That brilliant lawyer, the late Rufus Choate, remarked, on
reading this life, that there did not seem to have been in Burr a
single glimpse of so much as the last and poorest tribute vice pays
to virtue, not even the affectation of a noble sentiment. But we may
claim with justice, that the friendship with his daughter is one
bright place in that frightfully stained, one golden gleam on that
dismally mutilated, career. Mention should be made of Richard and
Maria Edgeworth, among those whose union as father and daughter, was
merged in a superior fellowship as friends, in a more intimate and
delightful junction of ideas, sentiments, and labors. Their united
lives, their mutual devotion, their shared counsels, pleasures, and
tasks, form one of the finest of domestic pictures, a model of a
Christian household. In the preface to the life of himself which he
left for Maria to complete and publish, he says, "If my daughter
should perceive any extenuation or any exaggeration, it would wound
her feelings, she would be obliged to alter or omit, and her
affection for me would be diminished: can the public have a better
surety than this for the accuracy of these memoirs?" And Maria says,
"Few, I believe, have ever enjoyed such happiness, or such
advantages, as I have had in the instructions, society, and unbounded
confidence and affection of such a father and such a friend. He was,
in truth, ever since I could think or feel, the first object and
motive of my mind." One of the most remarkable friendships of this
sort was that of Madame de Staël and her father. Necker was a kind,
good, and able man, who occupied a distinguished position and played
a prominent part in his time. But the genius of his impassioned
daughter transfigured him into a hero and a sage. Her attachment to
him was, in personal relations, the dominant sentiment of her life.
With distinct comprehension and glowing sympathy, she entered into
his thoughts and fortunes. She was to him an invaluable source of
strength, counsel, and consolation.

An instance, partly ludicrous, illustrates her tender solicitude for
him; and it also shows how the mere idea of an event has, with a
person of her genius, the power of the actual occurrence. The
coachman chanced to overset and considerably damage the empty family
carriage. When told of it, she was indifferent until the idea of
danger to her father struck her; then, exclaiming, "My God! had M.
Necker been in it, he might have been killed," she rushed to the
luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations,
mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her
father died, Madame de Staël was plunged into despairing grief, from
which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share
in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of
her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond
undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted
estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that
egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy,
which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great
and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived
him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often
said, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." The touching
words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed
over, in which she summed up her life, were these: "I have always
been the same, intense and sad. I have loved God, my father, and
liberty." The unhappy Letitia Landon found a congenial friend in her
father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her
misfortunes. She closes her poem of "The Troubadour" with an
affecting tribute to his memory:

My heart hath said no name but thine
Shall be on this last page of mine.

Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy
the friendship of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us
to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the
conditions of so blessed an experience.

FRIENDSHIPS OF SISTERS AND BROTHERS.

THE next class of friendships consists of those formed between
brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions
for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of
early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or
neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their
common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common,
are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences
enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and
zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter
directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a
rich friendship spontaneously arises between a brother and a sister
who advance to maturity in the same dwelling. A gifted woman, the
author of "Counterparts" and "Charles Auchester," who, devoured by
the flame of her own genius, died too young, has written, somewhat
extravagantly, "O blessed sympathy of sisterhood with brotherhood!
Surpassing all other friendship, leavening with angel solicitude the
purest love of earth. No lovership like that of the brother and the
sister, however passionate their spirits, when they truly love."
Narcissus, in the classic fable, had a lovely sister, to whom he was
most fondly attached. They were the images and mirrors of each other.
It was only when death had snatched her from his side, that, pining
under his bereavement, wandering by fountains and rivers, lie caught
glimpses of his own reflection; and, mistaking the illusory show for
his lost companion, fell in love with himself, and languished away
till rejoined with her in the pale world of Hades.

Hardly any picture in literature is more famous than that of the
friendship of Orestes and Electra. What divine beauty, what tragic
pathos, what immortal truth, are in it! And the friendship of
Antigone and Polynices is similar. With the Greeks this relation was
under the special protection of Apollo and Diana, the divine brother
and sister, whose physical representatives were the sun and moon.
Iphigenia, priestess in Tauris, in her distress for her brother,
prays to the goddess for pity and help:

For thou, Diana, lov'st thy gentle brother
Beyond what earth and heaven can offer thee,
And dost, with quiet yearning, ever turn
Thy virgin face to his eternal light.

A striking example of this relation, sustained with great fullness
and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the
sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The
canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they
were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their
retreats on Mount Cassino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night
together in spiritual conversation and communion on the joys of
heaven. Three days after their last interview, Scholastica died in
her solitude. Benedict, rapt in contemplation on his mount at that
moment, is said to have seen the soul of his sister ascend to heaven
in the shape of a dove. He immediately sent for her body, and had it
laid, with tender and solemn ceremonies, in the tomb which he had
previously prepared for himself. The friendship of Tasso and his
sister Cornelia has often been the theme of painting and of song.
When, escaping from Ferrara, lacerated, irritated, melancholy, the
poor half-mad poet fled from his persecutors, he thought he would
test the affection of this early playmate and friend, whom he had not
seen for many a weary year. Disguising himself as a shepherd, he
presented himself before her in her home at Sorrento. He drew so
piteous a picture of her brother's misfortunes and condition that she
fainted. As soon as she recovered, he made himself known; and
Torquato and Cornelia, with a swift revival of their old affection,
were locked in a tender embrace, as has been described by Mrs. Hemans
in a poem of extreme beauty and power of feeling.

The peaceful retreat, the glorious scenery, the gentle nursing,
restored him to health and cheerfullness. Alas that he would not
stay, but rushed away to his fate The beautiful and chivalrous
Margaret of Navarre was a pattern of enthusiastic devotion to her
brother, Francis I When Charles V carried him prisoner to Madrid, and
he was dying there, she went to him through every peril, and, by her
nursing, restored him. She then formed a friendship with the sister
of Charles, and induced her secretly to espouse Francis, thus
securing his deliverance by his imperial brother-in-law. The enduring
monuments of art with which Francis embellished his kingdom were her
inspiration. At a distance from him in his last illness, "she went
every day, and sat down on a stone in the middle of the road, to
catch the first glimpse of a messenger afar off. And she said, "Ah
whoever shall come to announce the recovery of the king my brother,
though he be tired, jaded, soiled, dishevelled, I will kiss him and
embrace him as though he were the finest gentleman in the kingdom."
Hearing of his death, she soon followed him. It is painful to know
that the love of Francis to her was not a tithe of hers to him. He
loved her, but treated her with a good deal of the feudal tyranny
which belonged to the age. She deserved from him boundless tenderness
and generosity. Sir Philip and Mary Sidney shared the same studies
and labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by
their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name
and dedication which the brother gave to his principal work are an
imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in
shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on
his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great
loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental
philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very
accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of
friends. Bishop Burnet has drawn for us a delightful picture of them.
He says, "They were pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they
were not divided; for, as he lived with her above forty years, so he
did not outlive her a week." The countess "lived the longest on the
most public scene, and made the greatest figure, in all the
revolutions of these kingdoms for above fifty years, of any woman of
that age." She laid out her time, her interest, and her estate, with
the greatest zeal and success, in doing good to others, without
regard to sects or relations. "When any party was down, she had
credit and zeal enough to serve them; and she employed these so
effectually, that, in the next turn, she had a new stock of credit,
which she laid out wholly in that labor of love in which she spent
her life. And though some particular opinions might shut her up in a
divided communion, yet her soul was never of a party. She divided her
charities and friendships both, her esteem as well as her bounty,
with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any
difference made upon the account of opinion. She had, with a vast
reach of knowledge and apprehension, an universal affability and
easiness of access, an humility that descended to the meanest persons
and concerns, an obliging kindness and readiness to advise those who
had no occasion for any farther assistance from her. And with all
those and many other excellent qualities, she had the deepest sense
of religion, and the most constant turning of her thoughts and
discourses that way, that has been, perhaps, in our age. Such a
sister became such a brother; and it was but suitable to both their
characters, that they should have improved the relation under which
they were born to the more exalted and endearing one of friend." Two
of the most distinguished in the long roll of eminent astronomers are
a brother and a sister, Sir William and Caroline Herschel. The story
of their united labors, how, for thousands of nights, side by side
they sat and watched and calculated and wrote, one sweeping the
telescopic heavens, the other assisting, and noting down the results;
how, with one spirit and one interest, they grew old together and
illustrious together; their several achievements, both at home and in
observatories on strange shores to which they voyaged, always
associated; with what affectionate care she trained the favorite
nephew, who was to burnish into still more effulgent brightness the
star-linked name of Herschel, the story of all this is full of
attractiveness, and forms one of the warm and poetic episodes in the
high, cold annals of science. The union of John Aikin and his sister
Letitia, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, in life, tastes, labors, was
uncommonly close and complete. The narrative of it; so warm,
substantial, and healthy was it, leaves a pleasing and invigorating
influence on the sympathies of those who read it. They composed
together several of their excellent and most useful literary works.
While Mrs. Barbauld was tarrying at Geneva, her brother addressed a
letter in verse to her:

Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast,
And paints one darling object unpossessed.
How many years have whirled their rapid course
Since we, sole streamlets from one honored source,
In fond affection, as in blood, allied,
Have wandered devious from each other's side,
Allowed to catch alone some transient view,
Scarce long enough to think the vision true!
Oh! then, while yet some zest of life remains;
While transport yet can swell the beating veins;
While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat,
And fancy still retains some genial heat;
When evening bids each busy task be o'er,
Once let us meet again, to part no more!

That evening came. In the village of Stoke Newington, they spent the
last twenty years of their lives, in that close neighborhood which
admitted of the daily, almost hourly, interchanges of mind and heart.
There was a friendship of great strength between Goethe and his
sister Cornelia. She was only a year younger than her brother, his
companion in plays, lessons, and trials, bound to him by the closest
ties and innumerable associations. While she was yet in the cradle,
he prepared dolls and amusements for her, and was very jealous of all
who came between them.

They grew up in such union, that, as he afterwards said, they might
have been taken for twins. The sternness of their father drove them
into a more confiding sympathy. When he had become a young man, and
was accustomed to make frequent excursions, he says, "I was again
drawn towards home, and that by a magnet which attracted me strongly
at all times: it was my sister." Cornelia had superior endowments of
mind, great force and truth of character; but she keenly felt her
want of beauty, "a want richly compensated by the unbounded
confidence and love borne to her by all her female friends." And yet
Goethe says, "When my connection with Gretchen was torn asunder, my
sister consoled me the more warmly, because she felt the secret
satisfaction of having got rid of a rival; and I, too, could not but
feel a great pleasure when she did me the justice to assure me that I
was the only one who truly loved, understood, and esteemed her." At
twenty-three, Cornelia was married to one of Goethe's intimate
friends, Schlosser; and, in four years, she died. In one of her
brother's frequent allusions to her, this striking trait is recorded:
"Her eyes were not the finest I have ever seen, but the deepest,
behind which you expected the most meaning; and when they expressed
any affection, any love, their glance was without its equal." In his
autobiography, written long, long after her death, he says,

"As I lost this beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt
inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there
arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might
have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could
be thought of for it than that of the Richardsonian romance. But the
tumult of the world called me away from this beautiful and pious
design, as it has from so many others; and nothing now remains for me
but to call up, for a moment, that blessed spirit, as if by the aid
of a magic mirror."

A relation of a more absorbing character than the foregoing existed
between Jacobi and his sister Lena. "For a long series of years,"
Steffens writes, "she lived one life with her brother, even ennobling
and exalting him by her presence. She took part in all his studies,
all his controversies; and changed the still self-communion of the
lonely man into a long conversation." There are many accounts, given
by contemporaries, of her minute carefullness for him and unwearied
devotion to him. Some make the picture a little comical, from the
excess of coddling; but all agree as to the unfailing and
affectionate sincerity of their attachment.

There was an uncommon friendship between Chateaubriand and his
youngest sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius,
spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with
my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives."
"Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness,
imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination
of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in
walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of
primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a
covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves,
and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our
recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to
write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed
days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we
had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed
over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages
in his long autobiography.

Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful
pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher
reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their
correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied
intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience
in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they
appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities
cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated
for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted
sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of
character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and
name.

The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were
overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long
trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in
his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its
lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years
younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar
temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same
bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a
naïve simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the
tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his
affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable
utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,

The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears; A
heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love and thought and joy.

They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until
William's marriage; nor were they parted then.

This plot of orchard-ground is ours:
My trees they are, my sister's flowers.

When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in
hexameters, in which were these lines:

William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You
have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.

At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a
common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite
sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in
heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that
who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her
information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of
nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the
period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the
dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,

When every day brought with it some new sense
Of exquisite regard for common things,
And all the earth was budding with these gifts
Of more refined humanity, thy breath,
Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,
That went before my step.

She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the
embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and
despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In
the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:

Then it was,
Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister, in whose sight
Those days were passed,...
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.

Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company.
His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition
he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that
Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed
with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the
"Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her.
And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will,
better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it
fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.

Mine eyes did ne'er
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either she, whom now I have, who now
Divides with me that loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned,
Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang.
The thought of her was like a flash of light,
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind.

The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad
things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have
veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble
qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses,
he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of
fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power
in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most
authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before,
acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One
can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and
fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley
called

The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head, like heaven, is bent--
An early but enduring monument.

Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady lustre
as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his
wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister
Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through
the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England.
With what convulsive gratitude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he
has expressed with that passionate richness of power which no other
could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for
her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew
drear and dark," he says,

When fortune changed, and love fled far,
And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast,
Thou wert the solitary star
Which rose, and set not to the last.

The wonderful verses commencing,

Though the day of my destiny's over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find,

wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into
language of such vigor and such melody.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,
Thus much I at least may recall:
It hath taught me that what I most cherished
Deserved to be dearest of all.
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

To her he sent one of the first presentation copies of "Childe
Harold," with this inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and
my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved,
this volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate
brother." He wrote to her those expressions of love beginning,

The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine;

and ending,

Nor could on earth a spot be found
To nature and to me so dear,
Could thy dear eyes,
In following mine,
Still sweeten more
These banks of Rhine,

expressions so transcendently fond and earnest in their beauty,
that it is a thrilling luxury to linger on them, return to them,
and repeat them over and over.

One of the finest and richest productions of his genius, both in
thought and in passion, is the poem he wrote to her when he was
living at Diodati, on the banks of Leman.

My sister, my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Mountains and seas divide us; but I claim
No tears, but tenderness to answer mine.
Go where I will, to me thou art the same,
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny,
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.

I feel almost, at times, as I have felt
In happy childhood: trees and flowers and brooks,
Which do remember me of where I dwelt
Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books;
Come as of yore upon me, and can melt
My heart with recognition of their looks;
And even, at moments, I could think I see
Some living thing to love, but none like thee.

Oh that thou wert but with me! but I grow
The fool of my own wishes, and forget
The solitude which I have vaunted so
Has lost its praise in this but one regret.

The last intelligible words of Byron were,
"Augusta, Ada, my sister, my child."

It would be hard to find a friendship more deeply rooted, more
inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible
trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that
of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written
expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister,"
composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in
the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of his single attack of
insanity.

Thou to me didst ever show
Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.

Mary was ten years older than Charles, and, as is shown well in
Talfourd's "Final Memorials," loved him with an affection combining a
mother's care, a sister's tenderness, and a friend's fervent
sympathy. Nor did he, in return, fall short in any respect. He
appreciated her devotion, pitied her sorrow, responded to her
feelings, revered her worth, and ministered to her wants with a
loving gentleness, a patient self-sacrifice, and an heroic fortitude,
which, as we gaze on his image, make the halo of the saint and the
crown of the martyr alternate with the wrinkles of his weaknesses and
his mirth. In one of her periodical paroxysms of madness, Mary struck
her mother dead with a knife. Charles was then twenty-two, full of
hope and ambition, enthusiastically attached to Coleridge, and in
love with a certain "fair-haired maid," named Anna, to whom he had
written some verses. This fearful tragedy altered and sealed his
fate. He felt it to be his duty to devote himself thenceforth to his
unhappy sister. He abandoned every thought of marriage, gave up his
dreams of fame, and turned to his holy charge, with a chastened but
resolute soul. "She for whom he gave up all," De Vincy says, "in turn
gave up all for him. And of the happiness, which for forty years or
more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her." He
never thought his sacrifice of youth and love gave him any license
for caprice towards her or exactions from her. He always wrote of her
as his better self, his wiser self, a generous benefactress, of whom
he was hardly worthy. "Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my
poor sister is the most thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of
selfishness." He was happy when she was well and with him. His great
sorrow was to be obliged so often to part from her on the recurrences
of her attacks. "To say all that I know of her would be more than I
think anybody could believe or even understand. It would be sinning
against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal
nothing I do from her. All my wretched imperfections I cover to
myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life
and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me." Their
hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious
at the time of her brother's death, and the blow was mercifully
deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would
invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was
laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:

Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow,
The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast.
Her only mate is now the minstrel lark,
Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark
Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed
A sister's tears.

Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who
knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors
entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary
and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.

The union of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn was something wonderful,
like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them
both. Such pure, tender, and noble souls are made for each other. The
more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not
interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when
together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions,
too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate
thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their
instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly
intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any
vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London,
sent to Fanny a letter composed in notes, she translated it first
with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of
these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter
or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth.
Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the
reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate
tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of
feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous
region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix,
amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible
calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of
his soul, rushed to the piano, and poured out his anguish in an
improvisation of wailing and mysterious strains, which held the
assembly spell-bound and in tears. In a few days a letter reached
him, announcing that his sister had died at that very hour. On
receiving the tidings, he uttered a shriek, and the shock was so
great as to burst a blood-vessel in his brain. Life had no charm
potent enough to stanch and heal the cruel laceration left in his
already failing frame by this sundering blow. The web of torn fibrils
bled invisibly. He soon faded away, and followed his sister to a
world of finer melody, fitted for natures like theirs.

One of the noblest and wisest of the American poets the pure, brave,
and devout Whittier had a sister who was to him very much what
Dorothy was to Wordsworth. Several of her poems are printed with his.
They always lived together; they studied together, rambled together,
had a large share of their whole consciousness together. After her
death, sitting alone in his wintry cottage, he said to a friend who
was visiting him, that, since she was gone, to whose faithful taste
and judgment he had been wont to submit all he wrote, he could hardly
tell of a new production whether it were good or poor. He also said
that the sad measure of his love for her was the vacancy which her
departure had left. He has paid her, in his "Snow-Bound," this
tribute, which will draw readers as long as loving hearts are left in
his land:

As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Gainst the household bosom lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed within the fadeless green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh! looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago: The chill
weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where'er I went,
With dark eyes full of love's content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June's unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life's late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?

One more instance of intense friendship between a brother and a
sister and it is one of the most