hear the whisper of the
gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should
say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter
how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable
degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be
frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and
everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your
lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend
is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.
If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall never
catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they
repel us; why should we intrude? Late,--very late,--we perceive that
no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society
would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we
desire,--but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is
in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not
meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the
last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's own worthiness
from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends,
as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to
establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends
such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever
the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal
power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us
and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of
nonage, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and
when we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands.
Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues
of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our
impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god
attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you
gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of
the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the
world,--those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature
at once, and before whom the vulgar great show