he is already
fast yielding to the incroachments and irresistible assaults of
declining years.

ESSAY XV. OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP.

Who is it that says, "There is no love but among equals?" Be it who it
may, it is a saying universally known, and that is in every one's mouth.
The contrary is precisely the truth, and is the great secret of every
thing that is admirable in our moral nature.

By love it is my intention here to understand, not a calm, tranquil,
and, as it were, half-pronounced feeling, but a passion of the mind. We
may doubtless entertain an approbation of other men, without adverting
to the question how they stand in relation to ourselves, as equals or
otherwise. But the sentiment I am here considering, is that where the
person in whom it resides most strongly sympathises with the joys and
sorrows of another, desires his gratification, hopes for his welfare,
and shrinks from the anticipation of his being injured; in a word, is
the sentiment which has most the spirit of sacrifice in it, and prepares
the person in whom it dwells, to postpone his own advantage to the
advantage of him who is the object of it.

Having placed love among the passions, which is no vehement assumption,
I then say, there can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where
there is not imagination. In cases where every thing is understood, and
measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question. Whenever
this sentiment prevails, I must have my attention fixed more on the
absent than the present, more upon what I do not see than on what I do
see. My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with
what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily
no image. Sentiment is nothing, till you have arrived at a mystery and
a veil, something that is seen obscurely, that is just hinted at in the
distance, that has neither certain outline nor colour, but that is left
for the mind to fill up according to its pleasure and in the best manner
it is able.

The great model of the affection of love in human beings, is the
sentiment which subsists between parents and children.

Let not this appear a paradox. There is another relation in human
society to which this epithet has more emphatically been given: but,
if we analyse the matter strictly, we shall find that all that is most
sacred and beautiful in the passion between the sexes, has relation to
offspring. What Milton calls, "The rites mysterious o