nd passages of
life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country
rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty,
and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the
trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and
offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It
should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert
and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so
well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for
even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be
altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It
cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in
this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite
so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a
fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of
godlike men and women variously related to each other and between
whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one
peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of
friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and
bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times
with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you
shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear,
but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and
searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between
two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good
company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly
co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No
partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of
wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may
then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not
poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense
demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires
an absolute running of two souls into one.

No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler
relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse.
Unrelated men give little